Volume 8, #5 June 2010
Oh, Grow Up
Assessing Your Company's Innovation Maturity
by Sheila Mello
To understand whether it's safe to give your R&D department the corporate equivalent of the keys to the family car--and figure out what to do if it's not--you need a framework for evaluating maturity.
It's 1978 in a small rural town. A Volkswagen Beetle drives on a private farm road that slopes downward through a hay field. There are no other cars on the rutted dirt path, but at the bottom of the hill the path intersects another road with more traffic. As the car gains speed down the hill, the passenger--who is both the father and the driving instructor of the 16-year-old driver--says, "Okay, brake now."
The driver steps on the brake. Nothing happens. She stomps repeatedly on the pedal, which slides smoothly to the floor each time. Finally, the father reaches his foot across the gear box and steps on the brake, bringing the car to a halt. Afterward, he realizes that his daughter had been depressing the clutch pedal, not the brake. She had not previously practiced moving her foot between the accelerator and the brake while the car was stationary.
Teaching a teenager to drive can be an exercise in anxiety for all parties. As a result of this incident (which actually happened to a friend of mine), the father found a driving instructor to take over teaching his daughter to drive.
What he needed--and found in the professional driving instructor--was a framework to both assess his daughter's capabilities and to help her improve them until she reached the level of driving maturity necessary to be safe on the road.
Regarding the maturity of their innovation efforts, R&D managers often are in the position of the overconfident father. "I know my company. We're good at innovation--just look at all the products we've produced. We must be doing things right." Sometimes it takes a disaster or near-disaster to highlight the problem with this approach. I hope you won't wait until your innovation activities are about to careen through an intersection to consider how assessing your company's innovation maturity might improve things.
The value of a framework
The first step is to get over the idea that you're already doing innovation really well. That may be true--but where's the evidence? We have used an innovation maturity model as a framework with many companies to provide that evidence as well as to
- give benchmarks for how best-in-class organizations are carrying out innovation;
- allow team members to talk without blame or guilt about how they are doing things now and how to improve;
- provide a means to assess progress toward innovation goals.
If you think that evaluating innovation maturity is only for startups or newbies or companies not known for innovation, take a look at the example of IBM's EBO (Emerging Business Opportunities) initiative, which we wrote about in a previous issue of Discoveries. And when we recently held a session on innovation maturity at a Frost & Sullivan global innovation conference, we found that although some organizations were doing a great job in a few areas, none were consistently getting high marks in all areas. There is almost always room for improvement.
The essence of the model: simplicity and consensus building
The innovation maturity model we use is presented in the form of an Excel spreadsheet that asks 30 questions related to three key areas of innovation: management systems, ideation, and incubation. Like one of the first maturity models to be developed, the software maturity model that came out of Carnegie Mellon University, it uses a scale of 1 to 5 to rank activities. The ingenious thing about this model is that input comes from those actually involved in the processes of innovation. Everyone from R&D directors to engineers to quality managers has a chance to evaluate current activities according to an objective scale based on the activities of best-in-class companies. What emerges from this initial analysis is a starting point for building consensus.
Here is an example of one of the questions in the ideation section:
B3) Alignment: Please rate the overall maturity of your innovations' alignment to strategy
| Level 1-Innovation is largely disconnected from all other strategies, creativity often for its own sake |
| Level 2-Innovation bounds are established locally, but are inconsistent across the enterprise |
| Level 3-Most innovation decisions are made with strategies in mind, but are often opinion-based |
| Level 4-Innovation decisions are made consistently with some explicit tie-in to strategies |
| Level 5-All innovation decisions & projects align explicitly with business & product strategies |
Setting priorities
Tackling all 30 areas at once would overwhelm most companies' resources. The idea is not to suddenly take on solving all the areas, but to use the results to decide what's most important. You emerge with a 360-degree view of innovation in your company--what's working, what's not, and where to improve, including areas you wouldn't necessarily think about without the discipline of a framework. The graphic below shows how aggregating the results of 6 of the 30 areas as an example leads to this 360-degree view.
With the results of the maturity assessment in hand, you can take the right next step to improving innovation--even if that means stepping away from the automobile and hiring a professional driving instructor.
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