There is no correlation between innovation spending and business performance. That is the main finding of the Innovation 1000 studies on the world's top 1,000 listed companies. Curiously, company size and investment in R&D don't automatically add up to an innovative company. There are other qualities that set truly innovative companies apart. Successful business projects often start with someone having a great idea, but not all great ideas come to fruition. Companies need to be geared up to encourage, recognize, support and implement great ideas if they want them to succeed in the market.

Successful innovative companies share five factors in common, which have emerged over the years as common to case studies and research projects. They are all related to R&D, business culture, and the abilities and skills that prepare a business for managing innovation. If you are an R&D leader or a senior executive at a company striving to be more innovative, these elements can provide you with the leverage you need to be successful.

• Strategic alignment. The most successful innovators can articulate a clear group of R&D priorities "for their purpose", aligned to the company's overall business agenda. This should not be taken for granted: articulating the right picture and aligning it to innovation priorities may require a great deal of thought and quite often lead to the wrong decisions.
• Innovative capabilities. These are the routine activities in R&D departments: customer engagement, generating ideas, commercializing them and executing the launch. The most successful innovators have developed distinctive R&D processes that are tailored to their own value proposition rather than a benchmark obtained from studying other companies. The best of these innovative capabilities tend to be multi-functional (involving people from marketing, IT, manufacturing and other disciplines as well as R&D) and creative (prepared to experiment, iterate and evolve practices as required).
• External networks and partnerships. Successful innovators are skilled at building and sustaining productive relations with external suppliers, distributors, educational institutions and service providers. They know how to leverage ideas and capabilities from outside the company as needed, to use at various points along the innovation value chain.
• Organization and processes. Organizational design comes naturally to successful innovators. They make sure the right incentives, decisions and information flows are in place to drive innovation performance. They also know how to put the right talent in the right place at the right time.
• Cultural alignment. Successful companies know how to attract and retain innovative talent. They foster the risks and strategic thinking that encourages innovation, creating the necessary communication channels, situations and environments.

It is extraordinary how so many companies invest millions of euros or dollars in innovation and yet fail to bring about the genuine disruptive innovation that will enable them to claim a competitive advantage in the market. These companies usually lack a truly innovative spirit, and tend to be organized by departments or silos, focused more on quarterly earnings than trying to revolutionize the market. To mitigate that shortcoming, they appoint an R&D director and invest millions.

In fact, the companies that change the market status quo have innovation imprinted in their DNA, and irrespective of their investment they are focused through and through on customers, on satisfying their needs better than anyone else or creating new needs.

It is impossible to talk about innovation and not mention Apple. At the company's annual convention a few weeks ago, CEO Tim Cook unveiled this year's novelties at an auditorium in Cupertino. For the duration of the event, which lasted two hours, one thing alone filled the air: INNOVATION (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38IqQpwPe7s). The iPhone 6, Apple Watch and iWallet were presented, and U2 provided the final touch to the event with an exclusive launch of their latest album Songs of Innocence, which they gave away free to all iTunes users. At half a billion people around the globe, that makes it the most widely released album of all time.

We need a lot more Spanish Apples if we really want our companies to evolve and achieve success on the world market, and for that we need to radically change the way we manage and understand innovation by making it the company's foremost strategic lever.