McKinsey: Testing for Innovation

McKinsey: Testing for Innovation

By Shlomo Maital

     McKinsey Global Research April 2015 has circulated a lovely article on Innovation: “The eight essentials of innovation” by Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston, and Erik Roth. It includes a short self-test for you and your organization. Their key point: (often repeated in this space): “Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting [and at times paradoxical] practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it.”

     Here are the eight questions you should ask:

• ASPIRE   Do you regard innovation-led growth as critical and do you have cascaded targets that reflect this? Yes/No

• CHOOSE   Do you invest in a coherent time- and risk-balanced portfolio of intiatives with sufficient resources to win?       Yes/No

• DISCOVER         Do you have differentiated business, market and technology insights that translate into winning value propositions? Yes/No

• EVOLVE         Do you create new business models that provide defensible and scalable profit sources? Yes/No

• ACCELERATE       Do you beat the competition by developing and launching innovations quickly and effectively? Yes/No

• SCALE   Do you launch innovations at the right scale in the relevant markets and segments? Yes/No

• EXTEND         Do you win by creating and capitalizing on external networks?

• MOBILIZE       Are your people motivated, rewarded, and organized to innovate repeatedly?

     Score yourself and your organization.   Six out of 8 or above? You’re an innovator.   Five and below – you need to make some urgent changes.