Implementary’s guide to helping your commodity organisation be more innovative:

Is innovation only found on the edges of your organization? Should your organization do more inventing rather than just improving? New ideas are having trouble becoming actionable?

Innovative businesses do not appear by accident. They are designed to happen. The Implementary Innovation Management Maturity Model enables you to benchmark the level of innovation management practice in your organisation, gaining a better understanding of where you are and where you want to be. 

A reliable outcome can only be achieved when people, tools, and a framework are in place. It is important to understand your organisation’s innovation management maturity to increase investment, demonstrate your organisation’s progress, and measure success. 

Read on to learn how to conduct an innovation management assessment and how to use the results.

Whether by accident or design, innovation can occur in organisations. 

We have found that a company-wide approach to innovation drives performance. Although some may argue that innovation cannot be forced, the research shows that it can be induced.

Innovation management, which deals with how you plan, organise, monitor, and control your organisation’s invention and improvement activities, is centred around a fit for purpose approach. In order for an innovation management program to be effective, three key building blocks need to be in place – tools, people, and frameworks. As a result, your organization will stay relevant, engage employees significantly, and provide better products and services.

• Innovation Framework: Create a shared understanding of how innovation happens both internally and externally of your organisation.
• Innovation People: Build the people capabilities and capacity you need both internally and externally of your organisation.
• Innovation Tools: Use technology to capture, review, collaborate and deliver.

For most organisations, innovation happens through a mix of accident and design. There isn’t a straight path from ‘command and control’ ways of working formed over several decades to the ‘inclusive and iterative’ approaches that today’s biggest challenges demand. 

A maturity model for management of innovation has been developed and is in use at Implementary. Using our model, you can compare where your organisation is now with where it wants to be, and how you might get there.

Informed by extensive research and experience, our model provides a structured set of maturity levels that describe the people, processes, and tools necessary to reliably deliver results. Your organisation is more likely to deliver consistent outcomes if its maturity is higher.

Analysing your organisation’s maturity goes beyond academic benchmarking. Being aware of how you rank has many advantages. Key benefits include:

• Support the case for investment. It takes money, time, and energy to become more innovative. Each step of the maturity journey unlocks benefits. Whether it is one-on-one interviews or a review of results, buy-in is built through meaningful conversations that come from the maturity review process, regardless of whether it is initiated by the maturity review process itself.
• Provide confidence that you are headed in the right direction. You can chart a path from where you are to where you want to be with the help of maturity assessments. Shared understanding establishes what pace of change is planned for – is it going to be a gradual shift over time or a rapid shift? Having this understanding smooths the process of making decisions regarding people, structures, approaches, and technology.
• Measure success. Measurement is often said to be what matters. You can set key performance indicators based on maturity scores for individuals and teams. For those with a competitive spirit, having a score that needs to be improved serves as a great motivator.

Assessments have two key components: the design and the completion. We’ve outlined the main ways in which you can go about one here.

Step 1: Design the assessment

• Area of focus: Assessments can be focused at a team, department or organisation level. It’s common for different areas of an organisation to be at different maturity levels.
• Resources: Assessments can either be completed by someone within your organisation as a self-assessment or by an independent third party (Implementary does independent assessments!).
• Identify your maturity assessment tool: you are welcome to use ours – feel free to reach out to us and we can step you through it with no obligation.

Step 2: Complete the assessment

Assessments are most accurate when they review published documents and interview key people in your organisation. Our approach is to:

• Understand where you are today
• Understand where you want to be in the future
• Calculate your maturity score using our Innovation Management Maturity Assessment Tool
• Identify actionable steps to get from where you are and where you want to be
• Share insights and seek buy-in for change

The value of an assessment relies on its translation into what it means for your organisation. Here’s an example of the types of actions that innovation management maturity assessments unlock.

About the Author

Jason Novobranec is Implementary’s Chief Operating Officer.

With over 20 years of Consulting, Program Management & Senior Leadership experience, Jason has delivered initiatives for large multi-national / multi-regional organisations as well as SME’s and is an expert in shaping solutions to fit a customer’s project needs.