Client€6B Global Forest Industry Company
SprintAn 8 week sprint
Fieldwork20 peers scanned · 68 innovations identified · 6 themes · 4 product groups
Strategy and Commercial Excellence
The biggest research budget was not the most inventive
A forest group wanted an outside view of what its competitors were actually inventing. Twenty peers were scanned across one calendar year and 68 innovations were found, scored and grouped. The company spending the largest share of revenue on research was not the one producing the most breakthrough work, and the theme with the most activity produced almost none.
68
Innovations identified across twenty peer companies
21
Of them judged genuinely disruptive
0.16 to 3.53%
Range of research spend as a share of revenue
7
Peers that disclosed no research spend at all
A note on sourcing. Every figure here comes from a SprintlyWorks client engagement. Clients are described, never named. Where a figure is identified, modelled or indicative rather than banked, the line says so.
01
Counting what competitors publish, not what they do
The method has to be stated before the findings, because it bounds them. Everything here comes from public disclosure: annual and sustainability reports, company newsrooms, press releases, industry association sites and patent filings. Nothing was asked of any competitor.
So a company recorded as having no disruptive activity has published none. That is not the same as having none, and the analysis says so in its own conclusion: the framing and the timing of an announcement changes how a company looks.
Sixty eight innovations were identified across twenty peers in the year, grouped into six themes and scored on four dimensions: technical maturity, commercial maturity, degree of innovation, and the partnerships behind them. The maturity scores are estimates made from public information and are labelled that way on every page they appear on.
02
The two themes that behave in opposite ways
The largest theme by volume, replacing plastic, produced 27 innovations. Twenty three of them were incremental improvements sitting at technical and commercial maturity around 8.5 to 8.8, which is to say ready or nearly ready to sell. Four were disruptive, at maturity around 3.8 to 4.0, which is to say years away.
The second largest disruptive theme, biochemicals, is the mirror image. Eleven innovations, every one of them disruptive, and the lowest maturity scores in the study at 3.2 technical and 4.2 commercial. Nobody is shipping anything there yet and everybody is working on it.
The theme with the third highest volume, adding functionality to existing products, produced eighteen innovations and not one disruptive among them. That is a sector improving what it already sells, efficiently, and inventing nothing.
By theme
Where the volume is, and where the invention is
One calendar year, twenty peers, sixty eight publicly disclosed innovations. Maturity is scored 0 to 9 from public information and is an estimate, not the companies own assessment.
| Theme | Total | Disruptive | Maturity of the disruptive work |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replacing plastic | 27 | 4 | 3.8 technical, 4.0 commercial |
| Added functionality | 18 | 0 | None to score |
| Biochemicals | 11 | 11 | 3.2 technical, 4.2 commercial |
| Sustainable construction | 6 | 3 | 6.0 technical, 8.0 commercial |
| Green operations | 4 | 1 | 9.0 technical, 7.0 commercial |
| Forest textiles | 2 | 2 | 5.5 technical, 4.0 commercial |
How to read this → Read the last two columns together. Sustainable construction has the fewest disruptive projects and the most market ready ones. Biochemicals has the most and the least ready.
SprintlyWorks analysis
03
Research spend does not predict invention
Thirteen of the twenty peers disclosed research spend for the year. The ratio to revenue ran from 0.16 per cent at the lowest to 3.53 per cent at the highest, with an average of 0.82.
The company at the top of that range is one of the leaders on disruptive output, so the relationship is not absent. But the second highest spender, at more than twice the average, published no disruptive innovation at all in the year. And two of the four companies identified as leaders sat at 0.38 and 0.32 per cent, well below the average.
The written conclusion is the useful one: research spend is not directly reflected in the ability to generate disruptive product development. For a company deciding what to do with its own budget, that is a more important finding than any competitor ranking.
04
What the leaders were doing differently
Two patterns separated the companies producing disruptive work from those producing improvements.
The first is concentration. The leaders were not spread across all six themes. One held every disruptive project in sustainable construction, three of them, on wooden structures for telecom towers and wind turbines. Another held the most in biochemicals. Depth in one theme rather than presence in all of them.
The second is partnering. Partnerships clustered in exactly the two themes with the most disruptive activity, replacing plastic and biochemicals, and the partners were mostly outside the sector: moulded fibre specialists, waterproofing technology, cosmetics chemistry, wind turbine blade developers. Companies inventing in adjacent fields were buying the adjacent expertise rather than building it.
05
What the client was left holding
A scored map of sixty eight competitor innovations across six themes, four prioritised areas where disruptive work is concentrating, and a working spreadsheet built so the exercise can be repeated rather than commissioned again.
The repeat is specified rather than suggested. Run it in March or April, once annual reports are published. Add social channels, industry association sites and patent filings to the source list. And include the client own activity next time, because a competitor benchmark that excludes you tells you where everyone else is and not where you stand among them.
There is no measured result in this work. Nothing was invented, launched or won because of it. The deliverables are the map and the tool, and their value depends entirely on whether the second cycle happens.
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