Comments

20% - very impressive - talent and new IT rule the world.

Posted by John at February 9, 2005 12:32 PM

Its always great to see companies reinvesting in R&D, especially at high percentages like 20%. Thats about the same as Microsoft, spending 8 Billion per year on R&D with roughly 40Billion in revenue.

Posted by Matt at February 9, 2005 9:23 PM

John & Matt, I wish more people were commenting on this. It's a "simple" post--but I think of the utmost importantance. (More worthy than the Carly flap.)

Posted by tom peters at February 10, 2005 1:53 PM

I think it's a critical issue. I work in the UK Health Service - in R&D until a year or so ago when I moved to work on evaluation of modernisation initiatives. We spend less than 1% of turnover on R&D. Even when you add in money spent by the pharmaceutical industry and research charities the amount struggles to get to 5%. Is it any wonder that the level of innovation and customer care is so poor? R&D is seen as a peripheral activity, rather than being seen as one that drives things.

Posted by Stuart Eglin at February 10, 2005 6:04 PM

This is an absoutely impressive reinvestment into building future business - I do not think that there are many companies comparable in size to Hummingbird investing this high a percentage in R&D. It would be more insightful if we get to know what is classified as R&D ,the distribution of this amount - in terms of what goes to maintain existing product line and what goes for future rollouts- a good indicator would be to understand how many new rollouts have happened in the past 3/4 years and how much business new version/products/service are getting as a percentage of existing business - That way we can related the effect of lead indicator like r&d expense to lag indicators like sale % of new product offerings.

Posted by Sadagopan at February 11, 2005 6:59 AM

Sadagopan, you are of course right. Classification matters. (The basis of modern science, eh?) And I can't answer all your questions. But, assuming the accountants signed off, the HBird Annual Report reflects commonly accepted practice re R&D, and even if a couple of points were at debate, 20 (give or take) Rings My Chimes!

Posted by tom peters at February 12, 2005 10:28 AM

20% amazing - Dr. Tom - this points to our shared interest in education and development of TALENT - in the free agent nation we must spend about 1/5th of our time at least in personal DEVELOPment R&D.

Every day is a fabulous new day to learn and experience the latest.

Posted by Jack at February 12, 2005 7:39 PM