By William D. Green, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, Accenture
September 2008
Despite competing priorities in a challenging and ever-changing global business environment, innovation remains a key agenda item for today’s leaders. They continuously search not only for the best ideas but also for help in translating those ideas into better business results and high performance.
The ability to innovate is a powerful tool: It can make organizations stronger, for today and tomorrow, by reducing costs, improving efficiency and launching new products or services.
At Accenture, our business is built around innovation—and it has to be, given that we compete every day on the ideas, skills and experience of our people. Like our clients, we face the constant challenge of ensuring that the best concepts rise to the top and get the leadership attention and funding they deserve. Over the years, Accenture has industrialized our approach to innovation so that we can be smarter and more effective at generating and developing new ideas. We have also stepped up our focus on collaboration, tapping into the innovative work our people do in serving clients across all industries and business functions, and sharing that knowledge with employees globally. In this way, we can bring to our clients the very best thinking across our entire organization.
To ensure our process for innovating is most relevant to our clients, we make significant investments in research and development, and we analyze emerging business, political and socioeconomic trends, and major technological changes that will have a significant impact in the next three to five years. In addition, our internal think tanks—the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business, the Accenture Technology Labs and our Policy & Corporate Affairs team—look at how we can apply the findings of robust research and technology innovation to help our clients address their most important business challenges.
This issue of Outlook further explores the topic of innovation. In the article “How to get the most from your best ideas”, the authors analyze the process of innovation as a business discipline and identify five key success factors to guide leaders in managing innovation with their organizations.
I hope this reading is relevant and insightful. There is no limit to the potential of innovation to improve or even transform an organization; we are limited only by how we manage it. In the end, the leaders who show some inventiveness in building a proactive and rigorous approach to managing innovation as a critical business process will be the ones who get the most value from the ideas in their organizations.
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