Success Solutions: Organizational Innovation Capability Assessment

Today’s business landscape is categorized by its dynamism. For example, a global economy produces opportunities for accessing untapped markets and gaining new customers but it also introduces new competitors. Technological advances provide unprecedented opportunities for discovering and meeting customer desires but can also lead to rapid obsolescence. Organizations that are skilled at innovation will clearly have an advantage in such a marketplace. Now, here are the billion dollar questions: what competencies are required to be good at innovation and how do you know if you have them?

The Center for Human Capital, Innovation and Technology has embarked on a multi-year project to identify the skills and competencies of successful innovator firms. Over the last two years, Center researchers have mined case studies, examining innovation research and theory in the development of a comprehensive organizational innovation capability assessment instrument. The instrument divides the process of innovation into three phases: innovation initiation, innovation realization and production, and innovation diffusion. At each stage, the tool is designed to measure specific factors that indicate a firm’s ability to produce the end products associated with the stage. For example, innovation initiation deals with an organization’s recognition of the need for innovation. This recognition may be driven by external factors such as increased competition or customer requests. However, it may also be driven by internal factors such as the insights of organizational members. Our tool measures how the firm becomes aware of markets, generates creative ideas and creates an innovation agenda or a map for organizational innovation.

While an innovation agenda is important, the Center researchers found that successful innovators were able to move beyond invention and creative ideas to prototypes and commercialized products. Some innovation analysts are concerned that even firms like Sony, known for their innovative products, are having difficulty taking ideas from the drawing board to the customer [1]. The innovation realization and production stage is concerned with the development of the innovation within the organization. The stage measures how a firm builds support for the innovation internally, mobilizes resources, develops and evaluates prototypes. One of the things that distinguish the Center assessment tool from other tools is that it uses information from the firm to determine the factors within an organization that may facilitate or impeded prototype development speed. Clearly, in a dynamic environment, understanding where bottlenecks in the innovation process occur is key. A great process that takes years might cause a firm to miss an important opportunity.

Finally, the Center tool measures the diffusion process. Innovation into an organization doesn’t end when the prototype is produced. The organization must assimilate the innovation into its way of doing business, that is, it must incorporate and foster acceptance for the innovation into the organization. Therefore, the last stage appraises the development of new routines and supporting processes to establish the innovation.

We are seeking organizational partners as a part of our pilot testing of this valuable assessment tool. If your organization is interested in using the tool to help diagnose its innovation capability, please contact:

Paul Tesluk or Susan Taylor
The Center for Human Capital, Innovation and Technology
University of Maryland, College Park
College Park, MD 20742
301-405-9541 

[1] Marketplace, January 5, 2003. A representative of the Institute for Innovation Strategy lamented that Sony should have invented the Ipod because they had the hardware power and also content (Sony Music). However, the Ipod “slipped through their fingers”. He attributes this inability to commercialize products quickly to a culture that “discourages nonconformity”.