I would've thought that increasing pressures of revenue while reducing costs would've been the number one driver.

Gartner found in its 2014 marketing spending survey – available free at www.gartner.com/dmspend - that 83% of large and extra-large companies allocated a portion of their marketing budget to innovation, and the average amount is 9.4% of the marketing budget, or about 1% of company revenue.

All you have to do is look at the rise of marketing innovation-focused events, consultants and courses available.  Marketing-focused conferences with the word Innovation in the title are both broad and industry-specific, for example “Digital Marketing Innovation Summit” and “Marketing Innovation Summit for B2B”.  We see the shift in focus of established conferences such as South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2014 from tech innovation to marketing innovation.

Instead of trying to modify legacy processes from internal IT, R&D or procurement which are restrictive and slow, marketing has the opportunity to do what they do best – be creative and develop a flexible,  high-speed model for digital customer-focused marketing innovation.

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