Last October I pointed you to my brief white paper entitled "Get Better at Due Diligence: 10 Tips for Improving Your Due Diligence Projects".  (All the MARCOM experts suggest titles that say things like "10 tips" or "25 secrets" or "4 dangers", so I took their advice.)  Actually it was rather well received.

I'm a stickler for messaging, and last month I stumbled upon a new presentation tool called Prezi, which is the latest tool (or maybe not) to replace or augment Microsoft's Powerpoint.  I found the demos and accolades intriguing, so I tried it using the aforementioned white paper as the source material.  The result of my efforts, after about 2 hours of learning and doing, can be found here.

Well, I don't know.  (Sorry I can't hit you with a grand conclusion.)  But I carefully read a recent report based upon a survey of "over eight thousand consumers and business customers" of the rated companies, the report and survey resulting from a collaboration between Strategos and wRatings.  Innovation was loosely defined as "delivering new-to-the-world benefits to end-customers ".  The researchers found that the average innovation scores of the top 10 pharmaceutical and medical device companies (of which only one was a medical device company) was about 46, whereas the averages of the top 10 for the food and beverage industry and the consumer electronics industry were about 76 and 84, respectively.  (By the way, the top 20 included six medical device firms.)

     That's kind of interesting with regard to pharma, as I've always believed that industry was not very productive or innovative when measured by ROI in R&D, partly (but not totally) because they have a a high bar to surmount.  But medical devices not innovative?  That seems counterintuitive.   Then I discovered several problems with the survey after thoroughly reading the article and communicating with one of its sponsors.

     The researchers measured "innovation" by weighted ratings of seven attributes: usefulness, quality, simplicity, coolness, uniqueness, variety and competence.  Well, I guess I could buy into several of those.  But coolness?  Okay, that could be one problem.  But the more significant deficiency, in my view, is characterization of the survey respondents; all we know is that they are some undefined mix of "consumers and business customers" of the rated companies.  What can consumers, i.e. patients, be expected to know about the degree of innovation of a product, let alone its producer?  Should we not ask physicians, nurses, buyers, other suppliers, even insurers in particular?  Certainly not consumers of healthcare services.  They are more likely to judge medical innovation based upon the "coolness" of a handheld device in the ER or a TV commercial sponsored by a supplier or hospital system.