Innovation is hot. It’s emerging as the management trend of the 2010+ decade, much like business process reengineering (BPR), quality (Six Sigma), and lean were the management mantras of recent previous decades. It is an endless topic in the blogosphere; check it out here and here. Even Bloomberg Businessweek is touting the innovation wave, here, if you can put up with the Bruce Springsteen metaphors.

Innovation is being hailed as the best source of sustainable competitive advantage. Management gurus, apparently, see no profit in being the low price leader, and being the quality leader is a costly position to maintain. But anyone can come up with a fresh idea. So innovation has caught on big among the Fortune 500 and beyond.

Who should lead transformative innovation as the Chief Innovation Officer (CInO)? You could make a case for the CFO, CIO, CMO, and others. And don’t forget the head of R&D. Who is your organization’s CInO? more

How does a company’s decision to buy back its stock or pay a dividend, or both, impact its stock’s performance? Several analysts at S&P, using data from Capital IQ, studied the companies in the S&P 500 in order to find out. Their research covered the period from June 2007 through June 2010.

During these 3 years, 353 companies, or nearly three-quarters of the S&P 500, both repurchased their shares and issued dividends. Just under 20 percent (95 companies) engaged only in buybacks, while 39 companies only issued dividends. Thirteen companies did neither.

The top average returns – although they still were in negative territory – belonged to companies that only engaged in buybacks. Their stocks returned 10.5 percent over the period. That compares with 12.7 percent for the companies that only issued dividends. These groups handily beat the firms that did both, which returned 21.3 percent over the time period. more