Absolutely no animals were harmed testing the safety of this page. Copyediting was not outsourced to child labor in developing countries. To my knowledge, no genetically modified organisms were used in this magazine's paper production or pulping process. Please don't boycott my column.

Global innovators are challenged by an intensifying commercial challenge not only to create new products, but also to justify the processes they employ to produce those products.  Colorful cosmetics that make us prettier are wonderful; cruelly testing them on animals is not. Creative fashions made of affordable new textiles are terrific; ruthlessly exploiting third-world child labor to produce them is not. Herbicide-free grains and vitamin-enriched vegetables are healthy innovations; unless, of course, they're the wicked Frankenfood monstrosities of recombinant DNA.

Processes, not products, have become the prime targets of activists, regulators, and litigators who recognize that the most cost-effective way to disrupt the introduction of a new kind of technology is to shatter the vital links of its supply chain. Global innovations no longer compete purely on features, functionality, and price; they compete on the global processes that create them. Because the manufacture of novel products can require novel processes, the most innovative companies prove particularly vulnerable to the most inventive activists.

That means successful innovators had better be clever and comprehensive about their marketing of both how they innovate and what they innovate. The tale of genetically modified foods in Europe, the United States, and Africa offers a perfect case study in the pitfalls of process-marketing mismanagement.