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Year after year, this analysis has proven that those firms identified as being the most effective innovators consistently outperform their peers and the market.”

Now is that surprising?

It should not be but sadly for the vast majority of companies that do not treat innovation as seriously as they should, as the growth enabler, it keeps them in a constantly lagging position. It tells a very powerful message, one of investing in innovation seriously and in sustaining levels, you can grow well above others.

Points from this research

I’ve known Tim Jones for some time. Tim is certainly a recognized leader in innovation, growth and foresight – he has always been helping organizations grow and be ready for the future and does some terrific work.

He is a founder and programme director for different initiatives “housed” under 1) the innovation leaders org,- this is the research programme that identifies the world’s most effective innovators  2) the growth agenda org, – that sets about helping companies build new growth platforms and 3) the future agenda – the world’s largest open foresight initiative explores the key issues facing society over the next decade.

Recently Tim has been  announcing the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies which achieve the most from their innovation activities and deliver tangible, sustained growth. Now in its 16th year, this annual analysis profiles the global leaders across 25 different sectors, (click this one to see who) highlighting the shifts taking place and identifying new achievements.

The 2016/7 analysis reveals three notable trends extracted from Tim’s supporting remarks from this recent report:

US Dominance in leading innovators

“After greater European and Asian presence over the past decade, this year 20 of the 25 leaders are US based organizations. This is the highest single country concentration since the research began in 2001 and reflects both the continued global dominance of the West Coast as a centre of innovation and its impact on other sectors across the country, some of which previously had a greater focus on M&A driven growth.

The remaining leading innovators are based in Denmark, Korea, Germany, Spain and the UK. The drop in European presence on the list, down 50% within a couple of years, should be raising some hard questions about the future of innovation across Europe”

My thoughts here: For me this does raise real concerns on innovation across Europe. It consistently is lagging and seemingly not catching up as it does not have all the levers to become more dynamic in growth as we are seeing in the tepid economic growth conditions seen in most European countries.

Partnerships at the Fore – the trend critical to finding new growth

“Although effective collaboration has been a key component of successful innovation for some sectors for some time, it is clear that, today, this is increasingly influential across the board. Organisation’s such as Accenture and Cisco and KT Corporation have positioned themselves specifically to help to drive customer innovation; companies like Adidas, Delta and LEGO are using partnerships to maximise brand impact; and firms including Boston Scientific, Dow Chemical and Lilly are all focused on collaboration across their respective ecosystems. Irrespective of sector, deeper partnership-driven innovation is very much at the fore. This does not suggest that the days of ‘going it alone’ are over, but highlights how, in an ever more interconnected world, delivering high impact change requires new alliances”.

My thoughts here: This is why I believe the power of platforms and working in ecosystems is certainly one of the key ways forward to “innovate for growth”

Big Bets

“While some companies such as FedEx, Inditex, PepsiCo and Reckitt Benckiser, continue to focus on delivering consistent incremental innovation, more radical breakthrough approaches are core to several organisations’ growth strategies. It is clear from both new product launches and underlying patent activity. Alongside Alphabet’s significant ‘Other Bets’ activities, Amazon’s strong moves into AI and Apple’s major R&D investments, others are also raising the stakes. Whether this is Bank of America’s proactive positioning on block-chain, Humana’s investments in digital, LEGO’s movie partnerships or Nvidia’s expansion from gaming into automotive, more established companies seem willing to explore and support a number of major intelligent future growth investments: Tesla’s bold moves continue to capture many headlines but others are not holding back”.

My thoughts here: The radical / transformation bets are beginning to take hold. More companies worried over their poor growth track records are looking to find “growth pathways” but struggle to find the ways to do this as they have failed to make the necessary, sustaining innovation capacity building investments.

About the Innovation Leaders Analysis

In order to gain an insightful and validated perspective on the true innovation leaders on a sector-by-sector basis, the annual Innovation Leaders analysis assesses the performance of 1,500 of the world’s top companies against a number of specific key parameters.

The individual innovation and growth performance of the top companies within each sector are compared against each other and additional research around the differences between the leading organisations is undertaken to ensure that the perspectives gained are fully up to date. This provides what we believe to be the most accurate picture of the companies that are the most effective innovators in each sector, and allows us to highlight the respective key competitive strengths.

The eight areas that we research and input into the assessments across different sectors are:

1      Organisational culture and supporting structure;

2      Strategic focus on innovation driving corporate growth;

3      New product launches and relative success ratios;

4      Growth in revenues, profits and market capitalisation;

5      Average revenue and margin per product or customer;

6      Investment in activities such as R&D and marketing;

7      Brand value and human capital growth; and

8      Peer review from within the sector.

For more information on this research please contact research@innovationleaders.org or to view the recent presentations.

So here is a link to the results of the 2016/17 Innovation Leaders research that identifies the companies and a link to their new website

I’d recommend exploring this as I picked this up on from Tim’s LinkedIn post, as it was only published today, 5th March 2017, and where I have drawn most of this ‘informing’ post.

Essential read for those wanting to build the business case for innovation and see who is leading in innovation and growth returns from their focus on this.

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The post Setting yourself apart through Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies, are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.

This often needs different perspectives to form the final position. We fail to constantly review and re-engineer the innovation process and tend to layer more upon it, without a consistent reassessing what we are trying to achieve.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding.

Many of these for me have been utterly enjoyable to explore as they advance our understanding of the emerging management practice of innovation but you can’t ‘gloss over’ the basics of innovation.

The ability to translate innovation understanding is a constant challenge. The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within established organizations to achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ and understanding of the impact and return and establish a certain rhythm and return.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

Often we were missing the constants that are required to ‘set in place’ for innovation, I call these those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation that builds on a solid foundation.

The basics of innovation still form around building the engagement, leadership, and involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve and thrive. Then there is that need for a constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Then, we have the investments in structures, systems, and governance, making sure these are flexible and robust enough to make what we work upon, as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitative and exploratory. All coming together so we can end up with great new ideas, things and most importantly, in winning successful concepts that grow our business.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then, it is forcing us to reconstruct our innovation thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small. How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today.

The understanding of relating more to individual customer needs, building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined  diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time consuming and tough.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean?

There is this need to be reacting to this in new framing ways, building this into a new innovation road map for our businesses.

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’ innovation is well understood; often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This essential ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, coupled with new emerging practices to forge a pathway for others to understand and feel comfortable to use. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new; that blending of practice, existing, new and breaking.

Our need is to ask is how can we blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of the innovating beliefs and structures in place, so they can build and contribute to the ongoing building of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, surely a key focal area?

My work entails being reactive, reflective and responsive.

Sometimes as we take stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet, offering my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, that much is simply “rusting away¨.  Innovation needs a clear, strong core that needs constantly re-calibrating to the changing market conditions we are finding ourselves in.

We so often miss this fundamental addressing of the urgent need for peeling away these old decaying, rather rusty layers and fixing the basics on a new design, reflecting where innovation is today (not in the past) and where we believe it is heading for in the future by balancing out the portfolio and equipping ourselves with the capabilities and capacities to build these in progressive ways.

May I ask?

Have you ever had an independent assessment of your innovation process simply because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge? I would argue that so often senior teams are somewhat paralyzed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need and recognition of innovation’s importance

The challenge is how to unlock this often conflicting set of innovation pressures and bring everyone to a common point of understanding of today and where all need to head in the future.

I certainly believe we are in need to conduct some vigorous analysis of the innovation system as we have understood a lot but much does need to be challenged as the future will be managing innovation in a very different way; more collaborative, more open, more reliant on technology and customer involvement

I’d certainly recommend starting with both an Innovation Work Mat discussion and a Three Horizon framing of the future from today’s understanding of where we think it is heading and how can we plan out how to get there, in sensible steps, as part of any comprehensive review.

We do need to not only embed innovation practices we need to strive to update these- can I be of help?

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The post Reflecting on our innovation practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I recently wrote a post “Delving into a complex world- helping to keep pace”.……to help us to keep pace, learn apply and adapt.

Finding time to read and extend our thinking is a real struggle and going that extra mile to read thought-leadership views can be a step to far, I know but I can’t help myself, it is part of my job and certainly for me, many are really worth it.

In that post I was recommending Deloitte and their thought leadership as a good place to visit.

Now I’m not sure how many of you actually did, so I thought in this post  to pick out specifically two great articles and make a post summary of these, as I feel both of these might be useful, as they challenge and break new ground in thinking.

So I can’t compete with getAbstract or Soundview or many others, offering the service of learning a book’s key ideas in less than 10 minutes but hopefully the two I’ve chosen will beat the time it takes in this one read to cover what I feel cover two topical and important innovation thoughts of the present for many involved in innovation.

The two thought leadership pieces I have chosen.Each of these are in the field of innovation so hopefully they will be of interest and raise your curiosity to dig a little deeper, if not then you have the key insights (from my perspective) here and that should be maybe enough to become more aware.

The two I have decided to summarize are 1) Beyond Design Thinking and 2) Minimum Viable Transformation.

Beyond Design Thinking

Written by Larry Keeley, president and co-founder of Doblin, Inc., an innovation strategy firm known for pioneering comprehensive innovation systems and the famous “Ten Types of Innovation”. A ‘given’ place to begin framing your innovation.

Beyond Design Thinking – reflecting on its place

Here Larry is discussing another really important system, about Beyond Design Thinking and let me pick out the key thinking within this article:

It opens with “Corporations have grown enamored with design thinking” and although design is in the ascendance, as it is powerful, effective and transformational if practiced or approached right, its trend needs examining. The key to design thinking is it begins by imagining a solution that does not exist yet, and then set about outlining a pathway to realizing it. Normally we make an assessment of a problem and seek correcting it.

What is at the heart of design thinking?

Design thinking has at its heart the generation of (lots of) ideas, build prototypes, try many things, build narratives about them, test everything, do more of what works and all the time show a clear bias for action, looking to shoot for the moon, or even Mars. All exciting, motivating stuff.

The creep is we are beginning to make design thinking a panacea – we start believing it can fix the ‘dry stuff’, the overly rational planning approaches to optimize around predetermined and deeply analyzed market segments, we are actually abusing design thinking. Larry argues that certainly conventional approaches to planning are overdue for reinvention; design thinking is sometimes treated as superficial to truly deliver on grand expectations. It falls down attempting the wrong things or trying to fit design thinking into the events of the day.

Certainly I’ve seen or witnessed many brainstorming or management meetings that have asked along a design thinking expert, who pulled out of the hat, like the magical rabbit, a wondrous show to excite, determine and mostly fill an otherwise boring day. We all got terribly excited until the magic wore off and it didn’t make a scrap of difference. This is not what design thinking should be for.

It is crafting analysis with synthesis, it is expecting divergence and convergence

As business rushes to embrace design thinking, it does move tradecraft beyond simply plain, vanilla analysis, it does embrace synthesis that helps build bolder and more newsworthy things. It can help firms build breakthroughs and contribute to the ‘genesis’ of profound insights and that alone can become the basis for an innovation team to put in the hard work of building (and validating) a breakthrough conceived through design thinking.

It is suggested in the article “put simply, analysis without synthesis is predictable and commonplace, design thinking without deep analysis is reckless.” It is seeking how to do both in integrated, even dazzling new ways.

To quote again: “when we have such highly contested markets….. it becomes a real skill to imagine a better world, make it tangible, build narratives about it and then work through the dozens of obstacles that anything new faces throughout its development”

Even more so “in a world where connectivity, collaboration, interdependence and user engagement all converge to build modern integrated ecosystems, where we formerly thought of industries”.

The quest for elegant integration of our innovation solutions

So Larry Keeley is suggesting within this article beyond design thinking we need to find “elegant integration” as effective innovations today are more about this elegant innovation of the known than the primary invention of the new. This is what is driving industry transformation everywhere.

The road ahead for the design field is three fold: use information deftly to manage complexity, great design is a critical catalyst and acceleration to the overall advance you seek and you should avoid labeling this design thinking as it is informed analysis, seamlessly synthesized into a coherent, beautiful solution.

As we transform from examples like Candy Crush, Alibaba, and countless others have as their shared property: they fuse together insights that come from sophisticated analytics, with experiences that are brilliantly designed to be easy, smart, convenient and entirely understandable.

That is where the power of design thinking turns products into platforms, offering deep solutions and your industry evolves into an ecosystem. It is down to getting all the parts right, needing analysis and syntheses to work together.

My second summary: Minimum Viable Transformation

This is written by one of my favorite thought-leaders, John Hagel III, who has written here with Jacob Bruun-Jensen about minimum viable transformation and he has a follow up article of the same name over on LinkedIn focusing more on the edge to create new business value. Let me summarize the two, hopefully enough for it to make sense.

To succeed in today’s networked economy, businesses must participate in dynamic, evolving networks of diverse organizations. And while such networks can be difficult to navigate, they offer companies the opportunity to evolve their business models, deepen skills and knowledge, expand into new markets, and scale operations.

To stay viable amid accelerating change, businesses themselves must change more frequently—and in ways that use their business ecosystems as fertile ground for collaboration and transformation.

As an aside, I am spending increasing amounts of time on understanding ecosystems for innovation and its management, but that’s for another day.

Scaling edges that might become our new core

One method used to scale edges is minimum viable transformation. Scaling an edge is a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

Here, when we are at an edge, a company pulls together the essential elements of a new business model into a barely working construct, one specifically designed to test key risks.

Acknowledging and embracing minimum viable product principles

Minimum viable products, for example, are like prototypes—except that instead of being tinkered with internally, they’re immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire.

So why would a company do such a thing? The minimum viable product is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible. It’s designed not as proof of concept, but to test hypotheses and unearth unknowns that could sink a new offering.

For companies seeking to reinvent not only their products but their business models, minimum viable transformation allows for rapid iteration on the unknowns of a new business model—anything from minute changes to operational processes to full restructuring of the go-to-market strategy. At its core, it’s a strategy for gathering validated learning about individual business model elements, then assessing how those elements interact and combine to form one cohesive strategy.

The need today is to innovate at the level of the Business Model

Rethinking the fundamentals of how a business creates and captures value has become a priority, we are in a different era, the past one was of slow change and stable industries yet we still saw rapid convergence. The sheer acceleration and changes in technology, customer desires and the need to build ecosystems is making the Business Model far more important to focus on than product and service innovations.

The problem is we are still not clear how shifting business models is supposed to get done. Taking the trend “minimum viable product” populated by Eric Reis and his Lean Start-up methodology – it suggests by pulling together the essential elements of, in this case, new business models, into barely working prototype models, specifically designed to test key risks, you learn from ‘lightweight’ and readily adaptable versions of potentially new business models to take them forward or rethink your original hypothesis.

Both MVP and MVT are like prototypes but they are simply not passed around and tinkered with internally, they are immediately thrown at the market and subjected to trial by fire. In Eric Reis’s view it is all about identifying flaws and working to improve them as rapidly as possible.

This minimal approach must be specifically designed, not as a proof of concept but I repeat, to test hypotheses and gain knowledge about the biggest unknowns that could sink any new offering.

Each change from minute operational change to global restructuring is better understood by iterative discovery but with full disclosure to customers, who surprisingly are very willing to join the journey of learning. This becomes a validated learning journey.

The whole approach to this minimum viable transformation is looking for understanding to reduce the risks of large-scale change. The core principles of MVP – validate learning, rapid prototyping, frugal creativity along with thinking MVT for reducing risks, increasing understanding of scale and speed makes for a potentially appealing approach to working on new Business Models.

Why explore new Business Models at the edge?

Focusing on “scaling edges,” allows for identifying promising “edges” for the organization, then grow that edge until it becomes a viable new core or complementary line of business. Such an approach can make it possible for businesses to reinvent themselves while minimizing potential risks—and maximizing impact.

An edge is a growth opportunity that has the potential to scale—so much so that it can catalyze change, eventually becoming effective enough to replace the core of the business. A true edge should align with larger trends disrupting the industry. Edges involve fundamentally different business models and practices from those of the core.

Edges give the transformation team far more degrees of freedom to test and experiment with new approaches to evolving a fundamentally different business model.

We finish this with five guidelines for transformation on the edge

Today corporate transformations must be designed and executed quickly and routinely—not as once-a-decade events. Management teams are looking for best practices that increase speed and reduce the risk of pursuing business model innovation and change. That’s where minimum viable transformation comes into play. Before diving in, management teams should consider these five principles:

1. Learn how to learn. The central goal of minimum viable transformation is to learn from a true field experiment.

2. Pick up speed. There’s a reason this approach starts with the word “minimum”: The learning has to happen fast. As soon as a company executes the idea it’s pursuing, it shows its hand to competitors— who will quickly respond with their own strategies.

3. Embrace constraints. Much has been written about the counter-intuitive effect of constraints—they don’t foil creativity, but fuel it. It’s worth noting that the very constraints we’ve been talking about here—few bells and whistles and scarce time—take real creativity to address. At the very least, they compel a focus on the goal—the need to learn and reduce risk around the key objective.

4. Have a hypothesis. To succeed, transformation initiatives must clearly articulate both the need for change and its direction. Such a statement of direction helps identify key assumptions driving the change effort (assumptions that will need to be tested and refined along the way). Leaders will also need to develop metrics that measure short-term progress.

5. Start at the edge. Find an “edge” of the current business—a promising arena that can showcase the potential of a fundamentally different, highly scalable business model that could even become a new core. Starting at the edge gives the transformation team far more freedom to test and experiment, and more ability to learn and react quickly.

In short, these five key principles can help bypass traditional barriers to transformation, ultimately supporting more effective response to mounting performance pressures.

In Summary

Both of these articles come from a significant report, the full report is “Business ecosystems come of age“. The notion of business ecosystems is now a crucial focal point for innovation, analysis, and strategic planning. Businesses are moving beyond traditional industry silos and coalescing into richly networked ecosystems, creating new opportunities for innovation alongside new challenges for many incumbent enterprises.

The world is entering an era in which ideas and insights come from everywhere, and crowds, clouds, collaborators, competitions, and co-creators can fundamentally help define our shared future. The business environment is being permanently altered as a result.

We require the thinking of thought leaders to emphasize and point us to ideas that we can adopt, experiment with and learn to our own benefit. For this learning, you need the time to read, explore and experiment.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have this added to my own site

The post Deeper read or quick summary- finding the time first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

In a just-released “The State of Innovation Management in 2015” that I have authored and kindly provided by HYPE for free, I believe you will find something of interest that you missed during a busy year, coming to a close.

I certainly hope you will find time to go through it.

You’ll gain a valuable and quick insight into critical aspects that innovation managers and CINOs should be aware of. It is in an easy format of thirty-plus pages and offers a reference resource that builds a solid understanding of innovation today regarding relevant factors that will stimulate and support your innovation activity.
http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

The Surge of innovation reports in 2015
I am sure you have experienced that in 2015 we have seen a significant surge in innovation reports, many of these coming from large consulting firms or innovation publishers. Each has been providing an updated view on where innovation presently ‘sits’, in its challenges and the needs to be addressed going forward.

I approached HYPE and suggested that there should be an attempt to pick out some of the interesting points within these reports, I was promptly given the challenge and they are providing this for free, a year-end bonus I feel.

Go to this link, which takes you to the landing page and simply register to obtain this free report provided by HYPE at the year-end. http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

Investing your time is always at a premium, I trust this report is worth it.
I decided this would be valuable to save you time or reconnect to some good reports that came out in 2015. Usually, we simply don’t have the dedicated time to wade through all these reports, they seem to come in waves or sometimes we even simply just miss them.

In this report now released I was highly conscious of saving your time and have tried to make as much of the reporting visual with as little text as necessary. Your need is to determine what is relevant to your situation and within the links provided you can explore these more if they have real relevance, I’d bet one or two really will.

The tough part was on deciding what to review, include or exclude. I took the view of just reviewing all the known (to me) reports coming out in 2015, with an exception or two going back to 2014 if it supported my thinking of what I think you might view as relevant as against just interesting. I was looking to achieve some “actionable relevancy”

I ‘housed those’ under a few important headings

These included leadership issues, concerns and needs, secondly the poor way we seem to be spending our innovation budgets, and thirdly some handy lists of the benefits of collaborating seen from both the large and small organizations’ perspectives.

Also an excellent benchmarking study full of really relevant tables that will get you comparing or constructing your own comparisons, some aspects of global R&D spending, a short view of some innovation leaders who gathered and debated three ‘choice’ topics of their top of mind concerns around innovation.

Finally I had to include one report on looking at the new innovation equation, a report I really felt was not well-distributed but full of interesting thoughts and relevant tables to compare where you are with their reported group.

I am hopeful it gives you a stimulating read over the coming festivities as we begin to move forward into 2016 with some helpful looking back from these selected 2015 reports. If you need any further interpretation or my further perspective you know where to find me.

Here is the landing page again, simply register for the report and then hopefully it offers you something of value to you.
http://i.hypeinnovation.com/the-state-of-innovation-2015-report

Happy reading, a really great start to 2016. Innovation will continue to be at the forefront of our business needs

The post The State of Innovation Management in 2015 Just Released first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The top line news is how companies are seeing innovation transforming their businesses and their need to take a more sophisticated approach to innovation, so as to achieve the growth plans they are setting for the next five years.

PwC are suggesting there is an innovation transformation under-way: “Companies are changing the way they innovate“. They further state that “innovation is becoming a competitive necessity, if it’s not, then executives need to be asking themselves what they could do to improve their innovation process.”

All I am providing here are my initial takeaways from a report I would recommend does provide really good value in working through. It seems innovation is becoming far more the central driver of the organization’s agenda than in the past, where geographical expansion along with mergers and acquisitions were more dominating.

It seems the future focus is far more on leveraging organic growth as organizations view the increasing dynamic and volatile business environment will  intensify and be even more risky but to achieve their growth objectives they will be needing to look beyond the traditional options they have explored so far to-date, through their innovation activity.

Firstly the transforming taking place around innovation

The five key transforming aspects with leading innovators taking a more advanced approach to innovation:

1. Seventy nine per cent of the most innovative companies in their study have well-defined innovation strategies,
2. Top innovators treat innovation just like any other business or management process that can be disciplined and successfully scaled.
3. The leading companies are targeting a higher proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations, particularly around products, services, technology and business models.
4. They are planning a wider range of innovation operating models.
5. They collaborate more than their less innovative peers.

The factors setting the innovation leaders apart

Within the report findings, PwC are suggesting what clearly is setting the leaders apart can be summarized as they:

• innovate with purpose,
• have a well-defined innovation strategy,
• take a more formal and structured approach to innovation,
• are concentrating on a greater proportion of breakthrough and radical innovations,
• are planning a broader range of business model innovation,
• are exploring a wider range of innovation operating models,
• are planning to collaborate much more to generate a greater proportion of revenue from new products and services

The close of the report asks seven great key questions in the role executives do need to play in supporting  the innovation efforts.

1. Are you paying enough attention to innovation? Innovation is quickly moving up the agenda for all businesses, becoming a competitive necessity and the main driver for growth. When was the last time that innovation was discussed at your management board?
2. Do you have an innovation strategy? Innovation needs to be thought of as process which can be disciplined. A coherent innovation strategy aligns all elements of an organisation to its corporate goals. How do you plan to harness innovation to accelerate growth?
3. Is your innovation portfolio right? Innovation portfolios are evolving, including a greater proportion of breakthrough, radical, and non-product innovation and a much broader range of areas to innovate. How well-balanced is your portfolio and where are you prioritising your innovation resources and investments?
4. What is your innovation timespan? Companies too focused on the short-term never challenge existing thinking, while those too focused on the long-term overlook immediate delivery. A balanced perspective is needed. Are you creating the business of tomorrow while running the business of today?
5. Is innovation an integral part of the executive and organisational mindset? Are operational efficiency and innovation metrics part of all management meetings?Are the resources, investments,processes, organisation and governance sufficient to provide the space for innovation to thrive?
6. Do you know how to explore and find the really great innovations that drive unprecedented levels of growth? Is exploration something that people are incentivised to do?Do the innovation processes use leading practices to ensure high speed prototyping, exploration,and learning?
7. Are you an innovation blocker or enabler? Executives too comfortable with the status-quo are one of the greatest barriers to greater innovation. Do you have the mechanisms in place to commercialize and scale your innovations? The last mile of turning innovations into significant revenue growth is often the hardest.

For me, this has been a report well worth working through, so thank you PwC for providing these valuable sets of insights. They offer encouraging news for innovation and its critical role within the current thinking within leading innovating organizations and the changing treatment that innovation is receiving.

This is certainly good news from any innovators perspective and a more than valuable report to put under the noses of the leaders of the organizations that are more within the ‘innovation laggard’ camp.

Those ‘ innovation laggards’ that are  failing to appreciate the changes  that are taking place within innovation practice and recognizing how they can leverage their future growth in broader and significantly different ways. Exploring different, more radical innovation practices, that have the potential for offering a real impact on their future growth potential, far more than the existing ones they are presently undertaking and supporting.

www.pwc.com/innovationsurvey © 2013 PwC. All rights reserved.

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