A study was conducted by a marketing professor from INSEAD to understand the impact of Research and Development (R&D) initiatives across industries. For the study, only large companies with a turnover in excel of a billion dollars were chose. Instead of healthcare or high-tech industries that have the largest R&D budgets, the study sought to analyze for the CPG companies with more modest budgets. These firms’ budgets are more concentrated towards marketing. The results of the business research showed that companies with a smaller R&D budget had a higher impact on sales than those with the largest ones including P&G which has overall the largest. The former group includes the likes of Henkel, Reckitt Benckiser, L’Oreal and Beiersdorf. The giants such as P&G fared worse off because their entire focus was on disruptive, large-scale business innovations. This took much longer a timeline to fruition and the results were often patchy. The smaller ones did not have the budget to explore the big changes, but instead worked on incremental innovations. The biggest of the firms often have their origins in chemical or pharmaceutical industries, thus placing the research team on a pedestal, which the latter had no compunction to.

Source:https://hbr.org/2018/09/reevaluating-incremental-innovation

Uploaded Date:27 September 2018