Your real problem may lie not in your company's technical creativity but in the business model behind it.
In the quest to come up with the next great product, many businesses ignore a possibly even greater source of differentiation--the next great business model.
My [Bill Lay] firm, PRTM, has done research into the performance of the top 150 global firms from 1975 to 2008. We have found that companies that focused on developing innovative products to the exclusion of all else have tended to derive little benefit from those investments. Instead of enjoying a competitive advantage over rival firms, they have ended up with very low market value, often for years at a time. They've gotten stuck in what we call the product trough, a kind of quicksand where they spend more and more money developing new products while their valuation drops.
Original Article: Innovation: New Products Are Never Enough - Forbes.com
