Most breakthrough innovations take at least 5 years or more to come to scale. Most corporate business cases are three years or less. This punishes innovators massively. Combine this with the fact that the tenure in most corporations is less than 5 years — and you have a no-win situation for innovation.
There are two ways to fix this: fancy and simple. The fancy way is to capitalize your R&D efforts according to an empirically derived amortization schedule specific to sector. The easy way is to use a 5 year NPV on innovations, like Amazon does. We’ll explain why based on insights from a 25,000 company global database on financial performance.
Robert Spivey
Director of Research, Valens Research
Robert Spivey, CFA is the Director of Research at Valens Research. He is actively involved in the Valens' team delivery of credit and equity research, macro analytics, idea generation, and client servicing based on the UAFRS framework, or Uniform Accounting.
Robert has experience from both a buy-side and sell-side perspective in finance from firms including The Abernathy Group, Legacy Capital Management, and Credit Suisse. He has leveraged this experience to work in both the credit and equity markets to gain a unique perspective of how markets work to understand the distortions inherent in the capital markets, and most importantly in the distortions in traditional financial metrics that capital markets investors use, and how to solve those issues for investors.
John Sviokla
Advisory Partner, Digital Intent
Former CMO at PWC US and Harvard Business School professor, John Sviokla is an executive, consultant, speaker, board member, teacher and investor. He works with top executives and entrepreneurs to transform their organizations and people for the digital age. He also serves as a board member for three firms.
He earned his BA, MBA and DBA from Harvard from 1979-1986. He joined the Harvard Business School Faculty from 1986-1998, where he pioneered courses on AI and eCommerce. John served as Vice Chairman of Diamond, a consulting startup focused on technological transformation of businesses, until 2010 when they were acquired by PwC. John was a Partner and CMO of PwC until 2018.