thinkitcreative

Making the choice to innovate and be creative in your business and in the products or services you offer—it’s a smart move that can can help differentiate in a competitive market. But does it mean you have to balloon your R&D budget or go on an acquisition spree to make it happen? Not necessarily.

Apple has been rolling out game-changing products in steady succession, while keeping their R&D spending at $4.6 billion, or roughly 10% of earnings over the last four years. And as Steve Cheney points out, that’s at odds with the strategy of some of its competitors.

Example: Microsoft, in contrast, have spent a whopping $31 billion—700% that of Apple—over the last four years.

Real innovation starts by thinking long and hard about your customers’ problems, about how solutions to those problems are being unmet, and then finding better ways to solve those problems in ways that benefit your customers…first.

Lulu, one of my favourite micropublishers, has wisely embraced Apple’s brand-new iBookstore (think iTunes for books).

The outcome: Apple gets more content, Lulu gains a distributor and authors gain access to a highly lucrative market of readers who buy a lot stuff online, including books. Everyone wins.

Lulu’s timing could not be better for this. Have a look at the kinds of sales that ebooks are generating these days. According to the International Digital Publishing (IDP) Forum, ebooks generated some $165.8 million in sales in 2009…more than triple what was reported in 2008 ($53.5 million) and more than five times the record for 2007 ($31.5 million).

Data: International Digital Publishing Forum

This is an niche industry that has barely…just barely begun to hit its stride.

Results for 2010 are already described by the IDP as being off the charts…some $60 million in January and February alone, putting it on track to score some $300 million in sales by the time the year is through.