SAN JOSE, Calif. — Most electronics companies pay lip service to innovation, but few have any defined process for making sure it happens inside their organizations. That's the view of Curtis Carlson, president and chief executive of SRI International, who wrote a book on the topic.

"Most of us are not doing a very good job innovating. Only a few companies we have found take innovation seriously," Carlson said in a keynote address at the Emerging Ventures conference here Tuesday (Oct 17).

"Google is an example of a company doing a lot of things right," such as putting out lots of beta products for feedback, essentially "tapping into their customers' genius," Carlson said.

"By contrast, Intel and Microsoft haven't done anything right in the last 10 years," he claimed. 'They have become big companies having trouble moving at the speed of the competition. History shows it is really tough for a computer company," Carlson added.

Indeed, in a chart Carlson showed plotting increasing price performance of computers over time, only IBM has remained consistently on the growth curve. More broadly the world's top 500 companies used to remain dominant for 70 years or longer, but today their reign on that list is only 12-15 years on average.

General Electric and Philips Morris stand out among the few companies who have remained among the top firms for a longer period. "The later company sells addictive products to a virtually unlimited market," quipped Carlson.

What's more, 30-50 percent of new companies fail after four years. Just one in three-to-five startups ever see significant success. And only one in 10-20 products last more than a year, Carlson claimed

"There are none of these numbers we should celebrate," he said.

Nevertheless, Carlson characterized the current era as a golden age with an abundance of opportunities to develop fully secure broadband wireless technologies, truly personal health-care technologies and more.

Carlson exploded several myths of innovation. Customer, not shareholder value, should be the focus of a company. The right discipline fosters, rather than inhibits innovation, and entrepreneurs are really risk mitigators, not risk takers, he said.

The SRI chief sketched out a five-step process for fostering innovation beginning with identifying customer needs and defining a system to generate new ideas for satisfying them. Carlson said organizations need to reach out aggressively to their customers and partners to fuel both parts of that process.

In addition, companies need to nominate champions, passionate leaders driving every new idea, and make them leaders in teams dedicated to bringing the innovations to life. He said, "Our slogan here at SRI is 'no champion, no project, no kidding.' "

Finally, companies need to work to make sure their organizations are aligned on these goals and present innovators with no bureaucratic barriers to success. "The people problems [behind this process] are giganticgenerosity of spirit if fundamental in today's business world," he added.

Overall, "Our ability to innovate is the greatest hope of America," Carlson concluded.