Depending on your industry, size and company structure, driving innovation within your business can be a huge undertaking. Some companies are founded with innovation in mind, while others may have struggled to innovate from the very beginning. Innovation, and coming up with new products and services for your business to stand out in the market is one of the most important things you can do to ensure its success.
So how do you determine which innovation strategy fits your organization best? In over 25 years of working with senior leaders in some of the world’s biggest companies, I regularly get asked this question. Thankfully, the answer is actually quite simple. In order to develop the right strategy you need to take a look at your company’s Competence and Commitment to bringing innovations to market. One of the best ways to do this is to assess your company on the Innovation Matrix, a framework which helps you visualize where your business stands on the road to innovation.
What is an Innovation Matrix, and what are best practices, tools and online templates for teams and organizations?
The Innovation Matrix tool provides business leaders with a way to visualize the different dimensions that exist for creating a new product or service. While various innovation matrix tools exist in the marketplace, we’ve made an effort to keep this structure simple. The two main variables we look at are Competence (i.e., the ability within the company to come up with and execute an innovation) and Commitment (i.e., how important the innovation is to the organization). The Innovation Matrix tool can be used by organizations to determine what category they fall into and what changes need to be made to ready themselves for innovation.
These two dimensions of the Innovation Matrix create 9 different classifications.
- No innovation capacity
- Thinking about innovation
- Talk but no action
- Unintentional innovation
- Average at everything
- Potential stars
- Effortless innovators
- Unconscious stars
- World class innovators
I’ve helped build the Innovation Matrix tool at Praxie, a platform for automating business processes by creating online tools and apps for driving innovation. You can access the Innovation Matrix tool freely as a download here. It’s simple and is based on best practices I’ve gathered in the 3 decades I’ve spent as a strategic business consultant.
About the Author:
Soren Kaplan is the bestselling and award winning author of Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, an Affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at USC’s Marshall School of Business, a columnist for Inc. Magazine, a globally recognized keynote speaker, and the Founder of Praxie. Business Insider and the Thinkers50 have named him one of the world’s top management thought leaders and consultants.
