Transforming your organization such that it is continuously innovating — continuously looking for ways to improve existing products, finding new growth opportunities or reinventing the future — is a long, difficult journey.
Like all business initiatives, enterprise transformation should be driven by a company’s vision and corporate strategy. To complete the journey, people must know where they’re going, why they’re going there, and how they’re going to get there. Once on the journey, it’s helpful to have a map.
That’s why we’ve developed this Lean Innovation assessment. Assessments can help you celebrate your accomplishments, but also understand where you are along the journey, what challenges remain, and what are the next steps you might take.
Our hope is that you will use this as a tool to help you establish priorities across a number of fronts — where, why, what, who, how, and when. For example:
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Where can improvements be made?
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Why there?
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What should the next steps be?
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Who in the organization do you need to involve?
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How should we go about tackling this?
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When do we do it?
What is Considered in the Assessment?
This assessment looks at four characteristics we deem important across three dimensions: people, systems, and management.
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People need to be Educated; learn new skills and establish a new mindset.
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Tools, resources, processes need to be established in order to Enable the new mindset to flourish.
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Senior management must fundamentally change aspects of the business, from organizational structure to performance management, in order to Empower the new mindset to achieve desired outcomes and become the new normal.
In the assessment, we gauge:
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Leadership Alignment
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Culture
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Investment
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Customer Engagement
Leadership Alignment
The goals of the company as defined by the leadership must be aligned with transformation outcomes, or the transformation is over before it starts. Maintaining leadership alignment throughout is fundamental to success. When leadership is not aligned, they will fail to make needed resource allocation decisions, the company will be rudderless, morale will suffer.
In the assessment, you will find out just how aligned the leaders of your organization are compared with the leaders of other organizations who have completed the survey.
Culture
Does your organization value collaboration? How is your company structured?
Left on its own, culture emerges from company structure. Based on your responses to the assessment, you will gain an understanding of how your company structure is affecting your organization’s ability to innovate.
Investment
Perhaps the trickiest part of transforming an organization is getting right the balance between executing and learning.
You will be asked to explore how your organization invests capital and resources, what hand (if any) your internal support functions such as Finance, Legal, HR, IT and marketing, have in the innovation process, and the level of investment being allocated to the transformation of your organization as a whole.
The insights gathered here will help you understand how committed your company really is to innovation and what factors are indicators that transformation is truly the goal.
Customer Engagement
Finally, we look to gauge your organization’s level of customer engagement and focus.
How often do the people inside your organization truly come in contact with your customers? How deep do these interactions go?
Questions like these will help you understand the importance of customer engagement for growth, and help you determine whether or not this is a weak area that requires additional development.
Putting it All Together: What it Means
Ultimately, this assessment is a tool to gauge your progress.
Companies that score near the top are further down the road of establishing the right mindset, developing the systems and processes to reinforce the new way of working, and are addressing the very structure of the company to ensure the new way endures.
Those at the bottom are at the beginning stages of the journey.
Is it Already Too Late for Those Who Score at the Bottom?
Whether or not it’s too late depends on the business.
It’s certainly too late for Blockbuster.
Disruption, or at least increased competition comes from a variety of sources: big tech companies (Amazon), startups, globalization, other Fortune 1000 companies and so on. If your company is not being disrupted now, it will be eventually.
Need is based on financial expectations and ambitions versus reality. If growth has been promised to investors and growth is strong and the future looks bright, low scores don’t matter. If revenue is declining year over year because of fundamental product or market shifts, low scores are potentially fatal.
If your organization falls in the latter category, identifying the issues now and learning ways to fix them as soon as possible may very well save the company from disruption.
Ready to Take the Innovation Assessment?
Fill out the survey below to begin.
Your results will be sent to you via email, along with additional information and resources to help support you and the transformation journey of your organization.
You will also have access to the anonymized results of every other individual who filled out the assessment prior to you so you can get an idea of where your company stacks up.
Get started now: