Companies worried they’re not keeping up with the innovation Joneses shouldn’t feel too badly. Shockingly, few companies are seeing returns on their innovation investments, according to recent research from Accenture LLP. Luckily, there are a handful of successes in the bunch from which the rest of us can learn.

Over the past five years, companies have spent $3.2 trillion on innovation, according to the report titled “Discover Where Value’s Hiding: How to Unlock the Value of Your Innovation Investments.” The rate of return on these investments actually declined by 27 percent over the same period, according to Mike Moore (pictured, left), senior principal at Accenture.

What are all of these well-meaning companies doing wrong? Accenture asked 840 executives around the globe to divulge the results of their innovation experiments. The majority of companies are failing because their projects are just not ambitious enough, Moore explained. They are making modest, incremental adjustments here and there.

“That’s really not enough to get new customers in this day and age,” he said.

Moore and Chris Wegmann (pictured, right), managing director at Accenture, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS Executive Summit in Las Vegas. They discussed the Accenture report findings. (* Disclosure below.)

Top-down leaders and an eye for new markets

Accenture partners with the likes of Amazon Web Services Inc. to doctor customers’ flailing innovation efforts. The technologies are available; the problem is usually cultural, according to Wegmann.

“Most customers are in this stop-and-go innovation traffic,” he said. They are stalled and stymied, while a small percentage of companies whiz by them. Fourteen percent of companies actually translate innovation investments into business growth, according to the report. What do they have in common?

Successful companies have leaders at the helm of their organizations prioritizing innovation. It may be a chief executive officer, chief information officer or chief data officer. “Whoever it is, they have to be 100 percent behind this and have to be the cheerleaders,” Wegmann said.

These are the people who keep rolling the ball uphill, operationalizing innovation projects and continuously improving them.

Successful organizations are also change orientated, according to Moore. They’re “network powered” and use partners like AWS and Accenture to develop new products and services. They look for disruptive technologies that can open up new markets.

For example, Accenture, AWS and charity Age UK Group have developed new products and services to digitally connect the elderly to their families. This presents a whole new market, according to Moore.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Executive Summit. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the AWS Executive Summit event. Neither Accenture LLP, the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE