Innovation's Six Critical Success Factors

Your organisation won’t innovate productively unless some underlying factors are in good shape. If “10” is outstanding and “1” is poor, how do you rate your organisation along each of these attributes?

1. A compelling case for innovation. Unless your people understand why innovation is necessary, it will always lose out to the core business and the performance engine in the battle for resources.

2. A fully aligned strategic innovation agenda. Innovation is a journey into the unknown and there are many paths open to the innovator. Before starting it is essential to ask these questions: What business are we now and what business do we want to be going forward? What is our risk tolerance for pursuing game-changing ideas?

3. Visible senior management involvement. The strategy for game-changing innovation, unlike incremental innovation, is often fuzzy – traditional metrics can’t be applied early in the process because there’s usually no frame of reference or benchmark for what’s truly new. The pursuit of major innovation only works when the person who can say yes to big spending visibly sponsors and participates in the project.

4. A decision-making model that fosters teamwork in support of passionate champions. Old models don’t work. Autocratic decision-making fails to engage all of the critical stakeholders, while consensus sinks every decision to its lowest possible common denominator. Innovation doesn’t work without a passionate champion who can make decisions and engage the entire team.

5. Open-minded exploration of marketplace drivers. Organisational change is driven by marketplace factors: customers, competition, government regulation, science and technology. Only by exploring these drivers of change can a company begin to recognise what it must do to be relevant in its envisioned future.

6. Willingness to take risks and see value in absurdity. Innovators understand that businesses have no choice – they must take risks, often big ones, by embracing the absurd, the seemingly irrelevant, in order to create pre-emptive competitive.

If your total score is more than 50, you work in a pretty innovative environment. If your rating falls below 50, then you may want to think about how well you`re poised for the future.

(Mark Sebell and Jay Terwilliger are managing partners at Creative Realities, Inc., a Boston-based innovation management collaborative.)

© 2011 Harvard Business Publishing