Innovation is a major driver of today’s world economy, enabling the introduction of new products that fuel top-line growth for those companies that are good at generating original and novel ideas. Few industries and sectors have relied on innovation as a key element of growth and business strategies more than technology and electronics companies.

To drive home the subject of his speech at the recent third annual Wharton Marketing Conference, Michael Polk, president of Unilever United States, flashed up a definition straight from the dictionary: 'Innovation: a new idea or method; a change in something established.' "It's not invention.... It's innovation" that is at the heart of successful marketing campaigns, Polk said. It's all about coming up with "dislocating ideas" that "disrupt the norm in a category."

A wave of supersizing in the brand portfolios of consumer packaged-goods (CPG) companies is coming to an end. Decades of unfocused growth, with acquisitions that doubled or tripled portfolios overnight, had left CPG companies, including such notables as H.J. Heinz, Sara Lee, and Kraft, suffering the economic health hazards of portfolio obesity. These include swollen costs, poor circulation of information, inflexibility, slow decision making, and stressful relations with shareholders impatient for returns.

Sopheon recently released a suite of new configurations for its flagship product life cycle management software, Accolade. Building on Sopheon’s deep domain expertise, the Accelerators can provide your organization with the process structure and support tools needed to: