inKNOWvations: August 2011

2012 R&D Survey: Exciting New Products — With a Side of Cost Control

Dave Fusaro

'New product development' is still the top R&D priority, but processors are creating brand extensions, cleaning up current ingredient statements and keeping an eye on costs.

As the Canadian-born chief executive and chairman of mailing equipment and software giant Pitney Bowes Inc., it’s up to Murray Martin to ensure the 91-year-old Stamford, Conn.-based company maintains its strength in its traditional postal services businesses, while expanding into new technologies, such as ticketing, QR codes and location-based data. In an interview with the Financial Post’s Matt Hartley, Mr. Martin discusses how he approaches innovation, the future of postal networks and new technologies the company has identified as priorities.

Shopper marketing -- defined as "strategy- and insight-driven in-store or retailer-specific marketing that includes some form of equity-building messaging" -- has become a widely practiced and transformational approach in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry, according to the 2011 Futurescope survey from GfK Interscope.

Many of us agree innovation = invention + commercialization. Commercialization is usually defined as launching the ‘invention’ so you and your customers realize value. But how many of us include how well we’ve extracted the innovation’s value in the market as part of our innovation process? Probably, not many; it’s just not that easy. Whirlpool, a long-time innovator, discovered that many of its innovations were not succeeding as planned in the marketplace. Moises Noreña, Whirlpool’s Director of Global Innovation, was tasked with finding out why and fixing it. He recently detailed how they went about it.

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