Richard Eisermann explains how and why companies should transform themselves into an innovation-led organisation where design and technology provide the best user experience.

Companies who want to transform themselves into innovation-led organisations first need to assess their degree of innovation. There are some standard measures that can be applied to this assessment. One measure of innovation is the number of patents a company holds or is in the process of applying for. This is indicative of how committed they are to actually developing new technology or how important they believe their new technology to be. But the issue of patents is tricky, because in today's fast-moving business world, patents are viewed as something of an anachronism. There's a lot of effort and expense involved in protecting intellectual property and it may not be worth it in the end, especially for smaller organisations with limited resources that has a shorter-term view.

Another measure of innovation is the percentage of revenues invested in R&D. Some companies spend nothing, some plough through 5-10% of their revenues back into research. This provides another number-based indicator of commitment to innovation.

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