Innovation – Too Much, or Too Little of a Good Thing?

Share buybacks, however, are merely exemplary of a bigger problem – that of corporations focusing on maximizing today’s earnings instead of tomorrow’s growth. Corporate profit margins, as shown below, are just one of many clues that corporate management has changed its modus operandi. The first graph shows the upward trend in corporate margins since 1990. The second graph shows the relationship of wages to profits and plots GDP. The declining trend in wages relative to profits explains a good portion of expanding corporate profit margins.

Corporate Profit Margins as a % of GDP

Data Courtesy: St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED)

Ratio of Wages to Profits Versus GDP

Chart courtesy: Lance Roberts streettalkalive.com

Corporate profit margins, which currently reside near 65-year highs, show that companies are making significant efforts toward running as efficiently as possible. This is a good thing and should be applauded by shareholders. However, before clapping, investors must ask if executives are neglecting future growth to run more efficiently today, and, if so, what is the opportunity cost of this sacrifice?

The best way to assess whether future growth is being neglected is to observe productivity data such as in the graph below. The 10-year average productivity growth rate (black line) has declined significantly from the levels prior to 1980. Similarly, note the widening gap between the pre-1980 trend (black dotted line) and the more recent trend of the past 30+ years (red line).

Companies are indeed sacrificing market-creating or empowering innovations to become more efficient, as supported by slowing national productivity gains. Companies are taking the excess earnings and increased free cash flow, resulting from efficiency gains, and either returning it to shareholders or plowing it back into more efficiency innovations and other expense minimization efforts. The intended effect is to rapidly improve financial ratios, metrics used to gauge a company’s performance, which by no coincidence are also used to justify equity prices and thus, often, executive compensation.

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) Trends

Data Courtesy: The Conference Board

The italicized terms in the passage above describe distinctions of innovations that were coined by Clayton Christensen, professor of Business and Administration at the Harvard Business School, best-selling author and co-founder of Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation. Christensen has long been at the forefront of the study of innovation and productivity.

Christensen uses the computer as a great example of what he calls “market-creating or empowering innovation.” Over the past 50+ years, computers progressed from the behemoth ENIAC, which weighed over 30 metric tons, to the desktop/laptop PC and most recently to pocket-able smart phones. Over this period the number of users increased sharply as costs decreased significantly. Inventing and producing market-creating innovations, like the computer, have a long time horizon and typically involve significant dollar and labor investment. The risks of failure are plentiful. However, despite the longer time frame, costs and many risks, the dividends resulting from such innovations are long lasting and result in new products, jobs and company and industry creation. Needless to say, durable economic growth for years to come is another benefit.

Efficiency innovations produce benefits as well, but they are not multiplicative as are market-creating innovations. Innovations in this group decrease the costs of producing or distributing goods, typically by reducing the man hours or resources needed to manufacture or sell such goods. Self-checkout registers at supermarkets are a good example. These registers do not increase sales, however, they decrease expenses as fewer employees are required for the same amount of goods sold. The benefits of using automated registers are predominately cost savers and do not create incremental efficiencies. They are one-hit wonders.

Efficiency innovations sustain economic growth by reducing costs and market-creating innovations produce incremental economic growth through the development of new products or services that subsequently proliferate. When both types of innovations are equally pursued, an economy has the best chance to reach its optimal growth rate. Efficiency innovations reduce the need for labor and other resources resulting in higher profit margins and ultimately additional profits to corporations. The additional cash flow and excess labor capacity can then be employed to develop market-creating innovations. When market-creating innovations come to fruition, they create new jobs, businesses and more efficiency innovations. This virtuous and reinforcing innovation cycle is essential to building sustainable economic growth.

Today this cycle is clearly out of balance as exposed by increased profit margins and stagnating productivity data. Additional profits resulting from efficiency gains are chasing more efficiency innovations instead of market-creating innovations like the next computer, Model T, steam engine or telephone. Jobs are being lost due to the gained efficiencies but new ones are not readily being created. As a result, economic growth is stagnating.

In an interview with Forbes in 2012, Christensen had this say about efficiency innovations: “Our current economy, however, has gone off of the rails in large part because we are focused almost entirely on efficiency innovations – on streamlining and wringing bottom line savings and additional profits out of our existing organizations.”

A year later he followed it up with this from an interview in Inc. magazine: "My sense is over the last 20 years the American economy has generated about one-third the number of empowering innovations as was historically the case." What's the potential toll of all this lost innovation on the future of the country? Christensen hypothesized: "If you want to know what the future of America looks like, just look at Japan. You can feel the same thing happen in the United States, and I worry a lot about that."

As noted above, GDP coupled with zero productivity growth is simply a measure of labor and capital deployment. Productivity is the leverage that allows us to get more out of capital and labor. In the short run, efficiency innovations accomplish this. However, in the longer run efficiency innovations can have a stagnating effect on economic growth absent the development of market-creating innovation. The chart below shows how the contribution of the three factors of economic growth (productivity, capital and labor) have changed over time in the U.S. This highlights my concern that we are not using our finite capital and labor resources as productively as we should.

How much longer can we rely on the benefits of the baby-boom demographic and debt growth to account for a large and growing portion of economic growth?

Contributions to Economic Growth

Data Courtesy: The Conference Board

As the data and Christensen make clear, we are reaching the limits of economic growth – barring new market-creating innovations. Recent U.S. demographic changes, characterized by aging baby boomers reaching retirement age and tougher immigration policies, are stunting work force growth. The current U.S. employment participation rate is at a 38-year low (equaling the 62.6% in October 1977). The demographic tailwind is quickly becoming a headwind as the burden of supporting a growing elderly population will become heavier. Facing this headwind, we also must contend with the increasing challenges brought on by record-high debt levels restricting our capacity to employ more capital. The ratio of total debt to GDP stands at 343%, the highest level in well over 100 years.

As a result, economic growth is becoming increasingly dependent on productivity gains as labor and capital growth become harder to achieve. Within the last month, the IMF, World Bank and Goldman Sachs downgraded their long-term economic growth projections for the United States. This was largely in response to dismal productivity data recently released by the U.S. Conference Board for the years 2013 and 2014.

Implications for investors

As investors we need to clearly understand these trends and the potential implications. Proper valuation of a company involves the estimation of earnings and cash flows for a long period of time. Most equity analysts form a baseline of current or near-term earnings expectations and then compound the earnings at a pre-determined and assumed growth rate(s). These growth expectations are typically tied to corporate, industry and overall economic projected growth rates. Slight variations in expected growth rates can have an outsized effect. This sensitivity to assumed growth rates is further magnified today by price-to-earnings ratios and other valuation measures that are at or near all-time highs. The chart below shows how a small 2% change in future earnings growth results in a 25-30% reduction in the present value of that expected earnings stream. Needless to say the combination of a normalization of valuations with a decrease in expected future earnings would be devastating for stock prices.

Present Value Sensitivity to Different Growth Rate Assumptions

Based on $1 of present earnings compounded using various growth rates as shown for 30 years

Public policy implications

America is an innovative society but we are putting too much emphasis on efficiency innovations and not enough on market changing innovations. This imbalance is costing us dearly. The mindsets of investors, corporate America and society as a whole needs to change. Focus needs to be redirected from the present to the future. For example:

• Executive compensation structures need to reflect the long-term performance of companies.

• The U.S. government should enact tax reforms that reward companies investing in market-changing innovations.

• The Federal Reserve should acknowledge and re-consider the consequences of extreme monetary policy measures.

• Investors should demand CEOs earn their exorbitant compensation by implementing thoughtful long-term investment strategies.

Michael Lebowitz is the founding partner of 720 Global, an investment consultant specializing in macroeconomic research, valuations, asset allocation and risk management. Our objective is to provide professional investment managers with unique and relevant information that can be incorporated into their investment process to enhance performance and marketing. We assist our clients in differentiating themselves from the crowd with a focus on value, performance and a clear, lucid assessment of global market and economic dynamics. 720 Global research is available for re-branding and customization for distribution to your clients. For more information about our services please contact us at 301.466.1204 or email [email protected]

Read more articles by Michael Lebowitz