I don’t agree with that at all. The clients might be happy in the immediate end of a project with a dose of warm and fuzzies, but if the end result doesn’t provide a demonstrable ROI, they won’t be satisfied for long.
My old boss at frog, Paul Bradley (who was at IDEO for nearly 20 years, he was a designer at Matrix before the merger of all the firms that became IDEO) said something to the effect of “Ideas can not be innovative. Innovation only happens with proven behavior change of the end user, and to do that, you have to make something”