What Practitioners Want To Know About Innovation

Innovation Tools recently conducted a survey of innovation practitioners to determine the most important innovation issues to practitioners. Over 250 people responded, representing a broad cross-section of industries and geography.

The responses were grouped by Innovation Tools into 9 topics:

1. Defining innovation and making it saleable and practical to senior management
2. Sourcing and managing ideas to come up with the best innovation opportunities
3. Connecting innovation to business strategy - and getting funding and executive support for medium and long term innovation initiatives
4. Identifying the best processes and tools to satisfy the needs of all parties to the innovation initiative
5. Building and sustaining an innovation and entrepreneurship culture
6. Measuring innovation outcomes across all stages of the process - and motivating the organization to deliver across all stages of the innovation process
7. Finding or building the people and capabilities to be successful in innovation
8. Organizing to drive innovation in our company and across the value chain - with particular reference to decision rights and accountabilities
9. Identifying the characteristics of innovation leaders at different levels of the organization - and recognizing and rewarding them

I think the list is terrific - comprehensively covering some of the key issues in innovation.

I would however be tempted to make a slight tweak to the topics list - the rewards and incentives to motivate employees (which appear in topics 6 and 9 and relate strongly to 5) could, I suggest, be usefully be brought out into a separate 'incentives and rewards' topic - bringing the list to a 'top 10' topic areas for innovation.

Idea Management Systems, while playing a very explicit role in relation to topics 2, 4, 6 and 8, also relates very strongly to topics 1 and 3. Idea Management Systems provide the rigour and repeatable results in innovation that are saleable to senior management. Idea Management Systems also align innovation activity with business strategy through implementing a Stage-Gate system that is necessarily aligned with business strategy as ideas are considered, screened or tested at various early stages in the innovation process and business strategy and objectives necessarily define the evaluation or screening criteria.

Booze Allen Hamilton Global Innovation 1000 Survey - 2007 Report Released

Booze Allen Hamilton have released their report for the third Global 1000 Innovation Survey outcomes.

The report confirmed that "as in years past, we found no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance." High-leverage innovators - "the companies that, compared to other companies in 2006, got a significantly bigger performance bang for their R&D buck" - achieved "better sustained financial performance than their industry peers while spending less on R&D."

The report found that:

When listing the reasons for their success, [high leverage innovators] all mention two key factors. The first is strategic alignment: They work hard to align their innovation strategies closely to overall corporate strategy. The second is customer focus: They all have processes in place to pay close attention to their customers in every phase of the innovation value chain, from idea generation to product development to marketing.

While the report did not focus specifically on company's approaches to Idea Management, Idea Management concepts permeated the report, particularly in relation to "customer focus." High-leverage innovators:

" . . . all have processes in place to pay close attention to their customers in every phase of the innovation value chain, from idea generation to product development to marketing."

Customer focus is a key element in idea generation, particular for organizations following a "need seeking" innovation strategy.

Looking For Participants for Idea Management System Experiences Survey

Has your organisation implemented an Idea Management System, or do you have an innovation initiative?

Idea Management Systems weblog sponsor Cognitive Transitions is conducting research into experiences with Idea Management Systems. Take the Cognitive Transitions Idea Management Survey to share your experiences and learnings.

The survey will be open until December 31st 2007.