Product Innovation Agenda 2010: Profiting From Innovation Today and Tomorrow is a follow-up to a 2005 benchmark study conducted by Aberdeen Group. Its objective was to re-assess the corporate product innovation agenda and to highlight the best practices of the companies with the best track records for new product innovation today and in the years ahead. Among its findings:

• Best-in-class companies are able to hit their revenue, product cost, development cost, product lifecycle cost, and launch date targets significantly better than their peers.

• Bottom-line benefits of successful product innovation were compelling, including an average 10% increase in product revenue and a 6% decrease in product costs.

• Firms enjoying best-in-class performance were 54% more likely to have a Chief Product Officer (CPO), Chief Innovation Officer (CIO), or equivalent executive responsible for product innovation than the industry average.

• Best-in-class firms are also adopting emerging best practices as they prepare to retain their innovation leadership through 2010 and beyond. They are 33% more likely than industry average companies to have open innovation processes by 2010.

• Clearly, the companies that are experiencing best-in-class performance are taking a different approach to product innovation - one that other firms can learn from.

What are these top performers doing differently? Aberdeen cites a combination of these practices: operationalising innovation, incorporating customers in the development process, expanding the engineer's view to the downstream impact of their decisions, and streamlining the entire product development cycle from innovation, through development, to engineering.