48% of executives are dissatisfied with innovation success ratio

In a Booz Allen survey of European senior executives (mostly CEOs, chief technology officers, and vice presidents of engineering and product development) completed in October 2004, 48% were unhappy with their company's ratio of innovation hits to misses, and 51% were dissatisfied with how their company identifies new service and product categories. And they weren't unclear about how to solve the problem: Out of a list of 12 potential steps their companies could take to improve their innovation practices, executives ranked understanding their customers better as the most important step to increase the value of innovation created in the product development process.