Beyond Transformation: The New ROI: Return on Innovation

Every company talks about transformation. Almost none of them can prove it created value at scale.

Here’s the uncomfortable question this book asks: if your organization’s most promising idea survived every internal defense, would it actually turn into growth, or slowly die somewhere between the pilot and the P&L, as so many promising ideas do?
For most companies, the problem is not ambition. It is the system underneath it. Organizations are built to reward continuity, not reinvention. So good ideas get approved, piloted, celebrated, and then quietly absorbed by the system they were supposed to change.
Dr. Davidson Lütkenhaus calls the answer The New ROI: Return on Innovation^™: not a financial metric, but the organizational capability to turn a good idea into growth that compounds, again and again, instead of evaporating into another slide deck.
Drawing on more than 25 years of leading innovation and transformation strategy inside some of the world’s largest organizations, across consumer goods, petrochemicals, automotive, materials science, beauty, and food and beverage, Lütkenhaus identifies six frameworks that quietly undermine transformation:
Through the Fragmentation Tax^™, the Transformation Theater^™, the Innovation Antibodies^™, the Innovation-to-Growth Gap^™, the Judgment Advantage^™, and the Efficiency Trap^™, Dr. Lütkenhaus shows leaders where transformation breaks down and where they can intervene to change the pattern.
The book closes with the Return on Innovation Scorecard^™, a practical exercise that helps leadership teams assess where their organization stands, identify where value is being lost and pinpoint the barriers that need to change.
It offers a different way of seeing why transformation stalls, where value leaks out and what leaders can do about it.

Announcing transformation changes nothing. This book shows you what does.