How Innovation Really Works

First introduced in Anne Marie Knott’s influential Harvard Business Review article, RQTM (Research Quotient) is a revolutionary new tool that measures a company’s R&D capability—its ability to convert investment in R&D into products and services people want to buy or to reduce the cost of producing these. RQ not only tells companies how “smart” they are, it provides a guide for how much they should invest in R&D to ensure that investment will increase revenues, profits, and market value.

Armed with insights from her experience as an R&D project manager, 20 years of academic research, and two National Science Foundation grants, Knott devised RQ and used the measure to test common innovation prescriptions across the full spectrum of U.S. companies engaged in R&D. The results are nothing short of game-changing.

This book promises to do for innovation and R&D what TQM did for manufacturing and what Sabremetrics did for baseball. It’ll show you How Innovation Really Works—with measurable results you can count on. 


• The RQ is a hot topic in business media and has been covered by HBR, Forbes, Atlantic Monthly, CNBC, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Inc. magazine
• Introduces an all-new, tested methodology for measuring and determining a company’s ability to transform R&D investments into profitable, innovative products and services
• The author is a popular speaker who has given presentations at major universities and industry events, including the Industrial Research Institute (IRI) Annual Meeting, Insight Venture Partners R&D Forum, and the Innovation and IP Summit
• Includes access to an online tool that allows readers to find their firm’s RQ and determine which areas need to be worked on to improve innovation