Here’s a self assessment from “Innovation to the Core” by Peter Skarzynski and Rowan Gibson.
Do you have a core set of people, distributed throughout the business, trained in the tools, processes and protocols of business concept innovation?
Have you built a systematic process for continually generating and managing novel strategic insights, and for sharing them companywide?
Are you using all the available means to improve the quantity and the quality of new ideas – from inside, outside and across your organization?
Are you systematically innovating across all the components of your business model, or are your company’s innovation efforts primarily focused on products and technologies?
Are you using the right evaluative criteria at every stage of the opportunity development process, or are some potentially valuable ideas being killed off prematurely?
Are your innovators generating ideas that are sufficiently radical to deliver breakthrough performance, and is your company stimulating and encouraging them to do so?
Have you designed an “innovation architecture” that gives strategic coherence and consistency to your opportunity portfolio?
Have you built mechanisms for rapidly reallocating resources behind new opportunities, along with a robust innovation pipeline for managing and commercializing those opportunities?
Is your innovation pipeline capable of managing growth opportunities with very different timescales and risk profiles?
Are you dynamically balancing the supply of innovation ideas and the demand for innovation ideas inside your company?
Are you using a comprehensive set of metrics to measure innovation performance – including inputs, throughputs, and outputs – and are you linking it to management compensation?
Have you put the necessary systems, structures and processes in place to make innovation a self-sustaining enterprise capability and a tangible core value?
