Innovation is to a company as mother’s milk is to a child -vital, nourishing, and creator of life-blood. A nursing infant collects all the nutrients and becomes stronger. A company starting on an innovation path, struggles, learns, succeeds, and strengthens. What is the readiness for innovation?
What is it?
But Innovation implies embarking on change, adapting to change, managing through change, and repeating the cycle. It induces employee anxiety when attempted the first time. But done enough times and with top leadership active involvement and cheer-leading, it becomes the defining characteristic of an organization.
Excellent recent Linkedin posts have described various aspects of Innovation. In “Killing Innovation” Broc Edwards lists characteristics that destroy innovation: who is hired, the “No” syndrome (no idea is a good idea), rewarding tenure and others. J. DeGraff describes “Innovation predictors” in four areas of Innovation: new technology or method push, consumer demand pull, nascent competitive clashes, and synchronizing coordination for innovation.
How can you assess it?
But, how does an organization assess its readiness for innovation? Can the current state be measured in some way to assess readiness and act for change? For example, if a department has a prevailing negativity environment (maybe a Mr “No” in charge), an innovation catalyst would be a head change. On the other hand, if the environment is generally optimistic, thoughts and ideas will flow and be shared, enabling innovation. By asking some questions and through observations the environment can be estimated.
I present a template below to assess an organization for Innovation readiness. At the minimum, this may serve as a guide to capture the current state and can be used at any level within an organization.
Three key factors are necessary for innovation success: Leadership engagement, Process flexibility, and Organizational forwardness. There must be active engagement at the topmost levels; successful innovation is usually driven by the CEO. For innovation to take hold, processes within the company must be (made) flexible to adapt to change. Think about Toyota’s legendary single-minute die exchanges which previously took an hour. The entire die set-up and installation process was turned upside down. The organization should also be forward moving to be adaptable to innovation by hiring the right people, creating a questioning environment, reward risk, reward variety, accept failures, and others. These three factors combined represent the Cultural Adaptability of the organization.
Innovation, Culture, and Growth
The link below shows the graphical interdependency between Innovation Success, Business Growth, and Cultural Adaptability.
The Cultural Adaptability, Innovation Success, and Business Growth are shown in the matrix. Organizations with a high degree of Cultural Adaptability will likely exhibit high degree of Innovation Success with Business Growth (upper right box).
On the other hand, rigid organizations with low Cultural Adaptability (CA) usually don’t show much innovation success (lower left box); these organizations permeate with “Mr. NO” types and have very little direct senior leadership engagement. While the upper left box is an unlikely scenario (unless a rigid organization is in a highly controlled or monopolistic market), the lower right box is debatable as any market or organization should always be open to innovation no matter how small. And innovation here is ripe for the making as the cultural fit is already there.
How can you develop and use the assessment?
How can this be developed and used? For starters, you can identify individual attributes that apply to your organization for each factor and rate each on a numeric scale of 1-5 (1 bad, 5 excellent). You can weight the factors equally and a simple sum will provide the total CA score. Once you know that, you know where you are in the CA scale, and can start identifying which attribute/s need improvement to move you towards the upper right.
One key factor is to identify who or which function can position, undertake, and complete the assessment, and have a follow-through plan. It may be quite difficult to start organization wide without due diligence, planning, and support. Imagine telling a CEO and senior leadership – “Hey, I am going assess whether you are good or suck at innovation”. His answer probably would be – “Ok; what will you do with the findings?”.
Examples of some attributes for Leadership engagement are: Leadership awareness of innovation needs; direct CEO involvement in large projects; CEO support of new projects; percentage of yearly budget or resources to radical (moon shot) projects, perceived authenticity of leadership.
Examples of some attributes for Process flexibility are: identification of key risks or uncertainties a process may face; mitigation (work around) capability of process risks (for example, if event A occurs do B); how quickly can a process change from doing one activity to another (for example, changing fixtures or marketing change from product A to B); how long is a decision cycle time, for example, time to design freeze.
Examples of some attributes for Organizational forwardness are: is questioning encouraged; the variety of projects; employee diversity, prevalence of “Mr No”; perceived level of trust (or mistrust) among employees.
What could you do if the Leadership engagement factor scored low? This implies either senior management is unaware or uncaring. If the former, then there is hope- raising awareness may help. If the latter, then you are better of doing your thing some where else and you can use the attribute checklist to determine fit. Leadership engagement is key; if there is real engagement and support the other two factors can be worked upon.
We all know of companies once located on the upper right box, that have either failed or are laggards. Examples are, Blackberry, Kodak, Motorola, and Blockbuster. Each of them failed to innovate at critical junctures and were out-competed. Not innovating is lethal and often fatal.
Innovation is hard, takes support and time, but can occur at all levels. Each one of us is an innovation carrier and can uniquely shape our environment and influence others as they join to form a critical mass. When you think you are alone, think about the power of one: Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela.
This article was originally published in 2014 in Linkedin.