ShareWelcome to this week’s edition of Simple, Smart & Sexy.
On our last video we compared innovation with sex. I have to say that it was one of the funniest videos to shoot! This one is not that funny, but it’s about measurements! Well, really about measuring innovation…
Take a look at today’s video and then… keep reading to learn why measuring innovation matters, how to do it and how we can help you.
Innovation Capacity
As I say on the video, the innovation capacity of a firm relates to the extent to which a company is capable of imagining, designing and creating the future. When a company is capable of doing so, growth is guaranteed (think Apple) and competitors become followers and stragglers.
Innovation depends on people, and as such Innovation X-Ray, unlike all other innovation assessments we’ve seen on the market, analyzes the innovation capacity of a company by surveying employees on three dimensions: talent, behavior and innovation practices.
The talent portion of the assessment helps managers organize innovation teams with employees that belong to different areas of the organization and also who have different talents, which means they will provide a variety of points of views. In the more than 10,000 profiles we have analyzed, only 2,98% of people have shown to have a truly, pure innovative talent. What we mean by that is that these very few will try to innovate regardless of the organizational structure they happen to belong to. As you can imagine, identifying those 2.98% is key, but it’s definitively not enough. This assessment helps understand which is the unique talent of each person in relation to innovation as to organize innovation teams.
The behavior dimension is key for Human Resources as it provides an outlook of what is the “psychological contract” of an individual towards its employer and to what extent a person will give the best of itself, its knowledge and its ideas to the organization. Measuring this is very important because behavior is highly correlated to the innovation capacity of companies. Also, understanding how to foster innovative work behaviors is key for any HR department.
Lastly, Innovation Practices. This study measures practices based on each stage of the innovation process as designed by our company. This dimension is very important because you can “think” that people understand for example what the priorities of innovation are, but if they don’t they won’t innovate. You may “think” the CEO message around the importance of innovation was good enough to foster innovation, but unless employees don’t perceive innovation as a business imperative, they won’t make it happen. Questions in this dimension are about leadership, direction, processes, client relationship, research, vision, marketing, implementation and results.
You can get a sense of what could be the innovation capacity of your company, by answering these five questions. If you’d like to know what type of talent in regards to innovation you have, send us an email at info@marianaferrari.com and we will provide you a free sample for you.
Feel free to contact us if you want to measure the innovation capacity of your company and compare it to your competitors!
Have a Super Week!
