Innovation Benchmarking: How Innovative Are You?

PRESENTER
Richard Sear, Partner
and Senior Vice President,
Visionary Innovation 
Frost & Sullivan





SESSION ABSTRACT
The term innovation is heavily used and more truthfully, it is heavily over-used. This session explored just what being a world class innovation company means. Richard Sear identified the core stages of an innovation system and introduced participants to the Innovation Maturity Model, a benchmark by which you can gauge the gaps your organization has in its capabilities, and more importantly, determine how to go about the process of addressing them.

KEY TAKE-AWAYS

• A key framework to understand the seven stages of a world class innovation system
• Key benchmarking tools to relate your organization to world class companies
• Best practices for implementing innovation techniques in your organization
• Personal techniques to address innovation, even if your organization does not support it
• 60% of companies will not see a 10-year anniversary
• If you do not have a clear big-data strategy within the next 3 years, over the 10 years beyond that point, there is a 50% chance your organization will fail
• If you’re looking for new areas of innovation, you need to start with big ideas, not small ones. However, you do need to break down big ideas into specific strategies that  can be implemented in a clear 3- 5- or 10-year plan
• The best companies in the world have the innovation team members embedded throughout the organization to see the innovation process through from start to finish 
• Innovation is the ability to create and sustain a competitive advantage in existing and emerging markets. It is a process of developing an idea into a commercial business solution
• In a competitive business world, it is essential for organizations to pursue consistent innovation in order to remain ahead of competition. 
• An innovation culture cannot be established overnight due to the abundance of obstacles. It is a long journey through various stages of maturity

BEST PRACTICE
The Technology Innovation Continuum has five levels of maturity:

1. Ad-hoc innovation
2. Defined innovation
3. Supported innovation
4. Aligned innovation
5. Synergized innovation

There are three capability requirements on the Innovation Continuum that contribute to an organization’s maturity level:

1. Innovation Process: This refers to the complete innovation lifecycle
2. Knowledge & Competency: A knowledge system that allows an organization to innovate consistently
3. Organizational Support: Infrastructure, resources, metrics, leadership, policies and strategies required to support innovation

EXAMPLE: This Innovation Process From GE Has Seven Key Steps:

1. Input – Ideas going in, captured in a way that it makes it easy for the  organization to digest
2. Insighting – A review level for captured ideas that seeks to understand the foundation of the ideas
3. Problem Definition – What is the problem that we are looking to overcome?
4. Solution Generation –Coming up with multiple different ways to tackle the problem
5. Qualification – How do we qualify the end need? Where are the opportunities and problems we could face?
6. Research & Development – Putting numbers to the idea, coming up with a business plan
7. Implementation

TAKE AWAY
Know your Innovation Readiness Score, based on the following factors 
(ratings from 1- 7, where 1 = poor and 7= excellent):

• Do you have no problem finding white space growth?
• Is your industry is being disrupted and do you have a plan to prosper?
• Are you strategically developing new business models?
• Do you have a clear 10-year vision plan?
• Do you have a fully optimized innovation pipeline?
• Organizationally, do you react quickly?
• Does every employee know your innovation process?

FINAL THOUGHT
The problem is that most innovation teams only have the first piece of the innovation process in place. The best companies in the world have innovation teams involved in the entire process to hone the ideas, work with the ideas, and cultivate the ideas. Moreover, most organizations are unable to reach a maturity level 5 unless they were established as a level 5 with all the organizational support for innovation from the beginning. Google is an example of this. Without being established from the start with the infrastructure, leadership, policies, and culture of innovation and change, organizations are typically able to reach level 4, which will still put your organization in the top percentage of innovative companies worldwide.

Finally, the one thing that will harm your organization faster than anything else, even faster than having bad ideas, is having ideas and not implementing them fast enough.