New research and technology indicates that innovation has less to do with inventions and securing patents and more to do with keeping an eye on external metrics such as customer service.

Over the course of the past year, IMT has covered different degrees of innovation and its impact on the manufacturing community. Slowly, but surely, what can arguably be seen as the single most important aspect of innovation has finally revealed itself: delivering top-notch customer service.

We’ll get to the hardcore customer service stuff in a minute. First, a bit of research from Frost & Sullivan via this Manufacturing.net article that underscores the importance of having a sound product lifecycle management (PLM) strategy in place, which this excerpt highlights:

PLM solutions provide the visibility into product development and provide enterprise-wide information across the globe, necessities for manufacturers who must reduce time-to-market, yet maintain product excellence. This need to reduce time-to-innovate is driving the implementation of PLM among leading end-user industries such as automotive, aerospace and defense, hi-tech and electronics manufacturing, fabrication and assembly, and consumer packaged goods.

“In today’s competitive environment, innovation is the keyword for manufacturing industries and those unable to drive the process of innovation face the danger of loosing valuable market share,” said Kishan M. Bhat, Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager.

But capturing and retaining that market share is a costly proposition, according to this Innovate Forum article. The article sets out to debunk the myth that a robust and dynamic intellectual property (IP) system breeds better products. Take this excerpt, for instance:

Fundamentally, the premise behind protecting IP rights is that companies or individuals need to be able to recover the costs incurred in inventing and developing a product. To this end, patents and copyright protection are viewed as incentives for inventors, and in the long run – as innovation drivers. But not everyone subscribes to this view. In fact, those that challenge this conventional wisdom are growing in number, and some of their thoughts on the subject are reflected in the following statements:

“People confuse innovation with patents, and that’s a classic mistake. Profitable innovation comes not from inventing a new product, but from having a team of smart employees who figure out how to do a better job every time they interact with customers.” — Danny Shader, CEO of Good Technology, makers of a BlackBerry look-a-like.

In other words, it’s what you do with the intellectual property that matters – not property itself – a notion that Toyota understands as highlighted here:

Toyota, and other firms like it, are successful not because of a particular unique engineering or design feature – but because, overall, the company’s reputation for quality and customer satisfaction is off the charts. In short, it’s not because they own the rights – it’s because they own the market.

So exactly who is responsible for driving customer-centric innovation? That’s exactly what a recent global study conducted by Harris Interactive Inc. on behalf of Dow Corning Corp. set out to do. The study, whose results are highlighted in this Reliable Plant article