The people who work for your organization and the partners they work with are the driving force behind your business's success. In today's marketplace, success depends on quick and intelligent responses to problems. To help ensure business success, you need to equip your people with the right tools to respond quickly to change, access the information they need to make critical decisions, and focus on strengthening and expanding profitable business relationships.

The days are long past when you could store information about each business partner on an index card. Salespeople no longer stay in the same job maintaining the same one-to-one customer relationships for decades. Randy Broad, the president, CEO, and founder of Opal Enterprises, is challenged by tracking information with outdated systems and a revolving workforce. "The problem with running a sales company with customer information scattered in different places is that when a person leaves the company, their sales information leaves with them."

And across the economy, managers are doing more than just paying lip service to innovation. They're putting their money where their mouths are.

The world's top 1,000 corporate research and development spenders invested $384 billion in innovation in 2004, according to a survey by the consulting firm of Booz Allen Hamilton. This investment by the so-called Global Innovation 1,000 represents between 80 percent and 90 percent of total R&D spending by business worldwide. By comparison, innovation expenditures of the second 1,000 most active companies totaled only $26 billion in the same year.

While the lion's share of innovation investment continues to be made by developed countries, the rest of the world is catching up rapidly. R&D spending in China and India grew at an annual rate of 21.1 percent between 1999 and 2004, according to Booz Allen Hamilton, compared to 6.5 percent for the Global Innovation 1,000.

As innovation becomes more of a preoccupation, its focus is changing. Gone are the days when an innovation was acquired from experts outside the company and then installed like a new piece of equipment.

When the nonprofit Council on Competitiveness recently asked 199 executives to identify their most frequent collaborators in innovation, suppliers and customers were cited by 78 percent and company employees by 70 percent. By contrast, universities and federal labs were mentioned by only 32 percent and 17 percent respectively.

"The competitive value of a fast and effective innovation engine has never been greater," says Booz Allen Hamilton Vice President Kevin Dehoff. "Yet of all the core functions of most companies, innovation may be managed with the least rigor. The key is to identify the priority areas where process improvements will have the greatest impact."

While it's possible that a shotgun approach to innovation spending will lead to a positive outcome, it's highly probable that it also will result in wasted resources. Better to precisely target the effort.

That's what happened at Zurich Airport several years ago after the bankruptcy of Swissair deprived the facility of its operational rudder. A private firm, Unique, was brought in to oversee operations and coordinate activities of the airport's 1,300 business partners.

The firm's managers weren't content to preside over the status quo. Instead they grasped the opportunity to create a system that would make every aspect of airport operations transparent to everyone involved in them, and in real time.

"We had this idea of creating a system that could give a high-level overview of what was going on all over the airport on any day, at any time," says Andrea Baroni, head of airport operations for Unique. "It needed to link together information from many different systems."

To make the vision a reality, Unique relied on Microsoft Certified Partners NeuroPie and Zuhkle Engineering to create a custom solution, ZEUS, on the Microsoft .NET platform. The solution, which smoothly integrates different technologies to create a single real-time picture of operation, has lifted Zurich Airport out of chaos to a position on the industry's cutting edge.

Successful innovation is about more than investment. That was made clear in a 2003 survey by the Boston Consulting Group in which a majority of executives expressed dissatisfaction with the return on their innovation investments (ROI).

Their disappointment likely stemmed from the complexity of the process, which can involve customer needs, internal business processes, and even corporate culture. An understanding of how such disparate elements come together is required if an innovation is to take hold and flourish.

Effective innovations that deliver a solid ROI aren't imposed from outside. Rather, they grow organically from within the organization.

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