It's more than five years since the U.S. authorities declared the end of the recession triggered by the financial crisis of 2008, yet the country's GDP growth rates are still meager. A sluggish U.S. economy and poor performance in Europe also explain why China's growth has slowed. After all, 70% of Chinese exports are targeted at those two markets, and there's a limit to what countercyclical economic measures can achieve.

In an interconnected world, less growth in China directly affects emerging economies that are still largely dependent on raw material exports.

An interesting phenomenon to examine is the behavior of corporations which despite having access to the lowest interest rates of the last century and showing a healthy cash position in their balance sheets still seem reluctant to invest in high-impact innovation projects. Too few golden opportunities out there? Senior executives not sure where to invest?

Investing in innovation is an opportunity to develop new markets and grow the economy, but if managers use metrics based on the premise that capital is a limited and costly resource, they end up prioritizing innovation projects only as a means of cutting costs and axing jobs. So instead of helping to increase labor supply and accelerate consumption, the opposite effect is achieved.

Harvard Business School professors Clayton M. Christensen and Derek van Bever have identified three different types of innovation. They call the first type performance-improving innovation, whereby products are replaced by better models. In this case, no new jobs are created because the people who buy the new products stop buying the old ones. They define the second type as efficiency innovation, aimed at cutting costs. In this case, productivity is improved but jobs are lost, which merely perpetuates the stagnation.

The third type of innovation is defined as high-impact innovation. In this case, technology is used to create products and services that appeal to consumers who previously had no knowledge of their existence. In other words, non-consumers become customers, generating a virtuous circle that benefits the firm, increases labor supply and accelerates economic growth.

If investors insist on results based on metrics that measure the efficient use of capital, if they ignore the fact that the scarce commodity in today's world is talent, and if they continue to prioritize the kind of innovation that leads to job losses, instead of incentivizing market-creating innovations, then we will only make the current situation worse. Business schools and opinion leaders need to take a stand in favor of new metrics for assessing business importance, metrics aligned with the demands of a different world, with a powerful emerging middle class eager for new products and innovative services.