Does your company have a world class innovation culture? This has become more important as corporate leaders have begun to recognize innovation as top priority for driving growth in their companies. The challenge they face is a gap between their innovation ambitions and the culture in their organization.
So how do you evaluate the innovation culture in your company? According to Strategyzer, innovation culture is driven by three factors; leadership support, organizational design and innovation practice. This leads to three questions that we can ask to evaluate our company’s innovation culture.
1: How much time do the leaders in your company spend on innovation?
At Strategyzer, we believe that senior executives, and particularly the CEO, should be spending over 30% of their time on innovation. If you are a senior leader, as you review the allocation of your time, ask yourself whether you are setting aside enough time to work on new ideas. If you are not a senior leader, perhaps you can come up with ideas of how you might inspire your leadership to spend more time on innovation. The bottom line is that leadership support is key for innovation success. So the more of it we have in our company, the better our innovation culture.
2: Where does innovation sit in your organization?
Without power or legitimacy, it is virtually impossible to drive transformative innovation. As you look at your organizational chart, where does innovation sit? If innovation is buried a few levels down from the CEO, it doesn’t have power or legitimacy. So the question for Your company is what can you do to raise the status and legitimacy of innovators. Moving innovation up the organizational chart and giving it legitimate influence will transform your innovation culture.
3. What is your company’s innovation kill rate?
To find great ideas, we have to make multiple small bets that increase over time, but only for the teams that are showing traction. This also means that we have to kill ideas that are not showing progress towards success. Most organizations will have a number of zombie innovation projects that need to be killed. The reason these projects exist is that no-one wants to admit failure. In most companies, admitting failure is a career limiting move. The ability to kill innovation projects and celebrate failure is a core part of transforming our innovation culture.
It is time for company leaders to address the ambition versus capability gaps in their organizations. A possible place the start is by answering the above three questions about their innovation culture.
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