Forbes recently published a list of the world's 100 most innovative companies. The measure they use is the innovation premium markets pay for their shares (in a nutshell: the difference between what the company should be worth based on cash flow projection and what it actually is worth for the markets, who assume some innovation to happen to increase earnings above projection) - as good a measure as any, as long as you stick to listed companies.
With salesforce.com the mother of Enterprise Software as a Service does not only lead the table, but does so by beating the runner up amazon.com (another cloud company, engaged in IaaS rather than SaaS) by a good distance. Traditional ERP companies follow only on rank 63 with SAP, which is still beating Oracle (not surprisingly) and even Microsoft.
It will be interesting to see
(a) whether other original SaaS vendors will join the list. Workday will be an obvious candidate. They are not yet a listed company but with an IPO planned next year they should be expected to take a good position. On the other hand, established listed SaaS companies like Concur haven't made the list. Maybe their recent acquisition of Tripit will give them a boost...
(b) how well the markets' assessment turns out to be in a few years' time.

Whether Enterprise SaaS is going to rule the world any time soon, we at iProCon dare not to predict. However, we are sure it will have a significant part of the market and many organisation will benefit form Software as a Service in various processes. That's why we make it our mission to help clients
- to decide about when and where to use SaaS
- develop their bespoke architecture including on-premise and SaaS solutions
- manage implementation and the the considerable IT and business change coming with SaaS

A recent HBR article (“Innovation in turbulent times”, June 2009: http://tinyurl.com/mmpgfg) discussed the need for businesses to have creative, “right brain” types in leadership positions. It suggests that innovation is the result of pairing creative with analytical thinkers - when businesses have too few creative thinkers in leadership positions, innovation is vulnerable to unwise cost cutting, in particular during hard times.

Whilst there is some truth in the need to have a good mix of “left and right brain” thinkers, that is nothing new – diversity of thought is vital to establish the strong funnel of ideas from which to promote those with the most promise. Where the article falls short is in the lack of structure it places around the innovation process as a whole. In fact, it starts with the statement “innovation is a messy process – hard to measure and hard to manage”.

Innovation doesn't have to be messy, and it should certainly not be left to the effective partnership between two individuals in leadership positions. When managed effectively innovation is simply another business process, taking ideas through prioritisation and realisation in a way that meets the organisation’s strategic objectives and takes account of the innovation culture.

For additional information on frameworks and tools to help deliver and measure innovation in your organisation please contact us.

Here is a very interesting talk from Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google, about the challenges at managing knowledge workers and how it is successfully done at Google: