Questions for Evaluating Organizations’ Innovation Intensity

1) What drives your customer retention? Is it more because of choice-based incentives you give them to stay, or high costs of switching?

2) How strong is your firm’s KPI bogey based on your announced strategy?

3) How strong is your process for ongoing, rigorous product and services critique and review?

Here’s the background for how these three questions became so important for evaluating the innovation strength of large organizations:

How good at innovation is our company, really?

That was the question that ILO was asked not long ago by the CEO of a $3 billion/year joint venture between two Fortune 500 firms to benchmark how successful they had been in creating a truly innovation-focused firm. 

You might be asking, in light of this, How good at innovation is my organization, really?

We created a diagnostic tool with five questions, interviewed the top 15 people on our member’s org chart, and investigated to determine our own answers to each of these questions on their behalf.

We’ve repeated and refined this benchmarking process with many other ILO Institute member firms as well.

It turns out that only three of the five questions are strongly dispositive. Substantial and accurate answers to these three questions can tell you pretty clearly how innovative your firm really is today, and how likely it is to fare in the practice of innovation in the next two years.

Try to answer these three questions as frankly as possible, and we’ll share an instant assessment. This is no substitute for a deeper review, but it’s a great place to start.