JG Summit Holdings
Innovation Health Report
Congratulations on completing the 5 Ways to Innovate health check. This report is a summary of the results and recommendations based on your responses to the questionnaire.
Executive Summary
4.7
Out of 10
Your Innovation Health Score
Your score places you in the category of
Emerging Innovator
Not bad, you've got a strong intent to help your organisation innovate. This block should be a summary applicable to companies who have scored in the “Emerging” category. It would give a high level overview of the things that are good and the gaps that are commonly observed in companies that score in a similar range. It should also include some general recommendations that are suited to the company and call out anything specific from the three areas (suitability, breadth and depth) of note.
5.6
Suitability
You need to build consensus on the need to do innovation. Leadership belief that your business today won't necessarily be the same business as tomorrow is foundational.
4.0
Breadth
You're spending that range of your company's budget on innovation. As a rule of thumb your company wants to spend 70% on the Core , 20% on growth , and 10% on moonshot efforts.
8.6
Depth
Innovation should create and deliver value so that outputs actually make it to market. You should focus your innovation efforts on building new features, offerings, and/or businesses.
Why is this report important?
Investment in corporate innovation is at an all-time high. So why do 80-90% of innovation centres still fail?
We studied 100 companies to identify what makes the world’s best innovators tick. What we discovered is that the vast majority of innovation efforts can be explained in just five simple categories, and selecting the right ones is the difference between success and failure. So we developed a system that helps corporates select the right mix of innovation initiatives to be in the 10% that succeed.
75%
Companies who place innovation in their top 3 priorities
20%
Companies who have the capability to execute on this vision
What are the 5 Ways to Innovate?
The best innovators on the planet focus on just five simple categories of innovation tactics.
We codified these five categories and built a system that determines a company’s optimal innovation portfolio across the three most effective initiatives, with a 100-day roadmap to get things moving in the right direction. 5 Ways to Innovate is a system to close the innovation gap.
Report
Methodology
Background
Our innovation health check assessment has been based on over 30 years of experience leading corporate innovation efforts at some of the world’s top companies including Deloitte, Accenture and Meta. We have analysed and optimised innovation efforts at dozens of Fortune 500 companies and refined our scoring methodology to simplify innovation efforts to the most effective building blocks.
The report has been broken up into three categories to make it easy to compartmentalise recommended improvements into focus areas.
Five distinct scoring criteria have been taken into account and analysed in a balanced scorecard in order to generate your scores against each of the three categories.
Scoring Categories
Suitability
Your innovation efforts should suit your context, including when you will be disrupted, your organisation's goals, and how you are organised for change.
Breadth
Innovation is a portfolio, not a project. You need at least three investments and efforts to create tomorrow's business with a 70/20/10 investment split.
Depth
Innovation efforts need to create impact. Your actions need to develop tangible output that is measurable and recognisable.
Scoring Criteria
-
The level of disruptive activity facing your industry sector, and how soon it is likely to affect your core business
-
The capacity and maturity of innovation capabilities that currently exist in your organisation that are capable of generating tomorrow’s business
-
How accepting your organisation is to change, particularly in terms of leadership’s ability to acknowledge and lead change initiatives
-
Whether you organisation has historically been a net creator of innovation (at the bleeding edge of the industry) vs. a net consumer of innovation (late adopters who follow trends set by competitors and industry best practice)
-
How close your organisation wants to innovate to today’s core business vs. attempting to innovate in more distant adjacent and transformational spaces
Your Detailed Results
Suitability
5.6
Out of 10
What is Suitability?
The level to which innovation efforts are matched to the organisation’s context, including industry disruption, internal goals, and how you are organised for change.
Why is it important?
Your organisation’s innovation portfolio should be aligned to organisational strategy. Without this, convincing other parts of the organisation to adopt innovation initiatives can become challenging.
What should you do?
To truly protect against disruption, you need to broaden out to have more than one way to innovate. We recommend a minimum of three distinct initiatives.
Recommendations
-
You need to build consensus on the need to do innovation. Leadership belief that your business today won't necessarily be the same business as tomorrow is foundational. Without it, innovation efforts may never get off the ground, get canceled at the first sight of economic trouble, or never be integrated back into the core business.
-
You've identified multiple opportunity areas for your efforts to explore. Ensure your opportunity areas provide 'freedom within the frame'. You don't want the focus to be so tightly defined that there's no space for freedom, similarly, you don't want an absence of a framework to focus resources.
-
While your organisation invests in innovation, you likely have specific innovation projects and initiatives. They may have fixed deadlines and try to run to the organisation's timeline or use traditional project management methods. Your organisation needs to shift to a mindset of ''always-on' innovation”. You should have innovation efforts that constantly explore the new and emerging to capture opportunities and bring them back into the core business.
-
Once you have well-defined opportunity areas to explore, your innovation efforts should experiment with building new features, products, or businesses for each opportunity area. Having multiple opportunity areas lets you run multiple experiments, protecting your innovation portfolio from experiments that fail or opportunity areas that don't emerge.
-
You believe your organisation should focus on core opportunities. Focusing on the core makes delivering an impact that helps create tomorrow's business difficult.
Adjacent opportunities strike the right balance - they're close enough to the core to have a competitive advantage but far enough away to innovate, and they can be delivered in a time horizon that is not too long term.
Innovation efforts will inevitably touch the core business as the opportunities build on your organisation's existing capabilities and competitive advantages. A deliberate focus on core innovation could be better suited to the core business. Innovation efforts outside of business as usual should focus on adjacent features, offerings or businesses that will help you build the business of tomorrow.
Your Detailed Results
Breadth
4.0
Out of 10
What is Breadth?
The level to which an innovation portfolio is diversified. Our recommendation is at least three distinct areas of innovation initiatives in order to provide sufficient coverage and de-risk against innovation failure.
Why is it important?
Your organisation’s innovation portfolio should look more like a portfolio than a project. This ensures that all of your organisation’s eggs aren’t in one basket, providing better coverage of your efforts.
What should you do?
You efforts are not having impact. It's not just enough to have innovation efforts but they need to be helping you to create the business of tomorrow through new features, offerings, or businesses.
Recommendations
-
You're spending that range of your company's budget on innovation. As a rule of thumb your company wants to spend 70% of it's budget on the Core business, 20% on growth efforts, and 10% of Innovation & moonshot efforts.
-
The most innovative companies on the planet maintain a portfolio of multiple innovation efforts. We recommend organisations maintain at least three 'always-on' innovation efforts.
The level of investment doesn't need to be the same, we recommend a 70/20/10 split across the efforts. As a rule of thumb, your portfolio should have a mix of invested (your own people and capabilities) and divested (outside of your organisation's people and capabilities) innovation efforts.
Our 5 Ways to Innovate assessment can help determine the right innovation efforts for your organisation.
Your Detailed Results
Depth
8.6
Out of 10
What is Depth?
The level to which innovation efforts are generating a material business impact. Your organisation’s actions need to develop tangible output that is measurable and recognisable.
Why is it important?
In order to avoid the trap of “Innovation Theatre”, these efforts should be measured in outputs, not inputs. We recommend using new features, new offerings and new businesses as success metrics.
What should you do?
There's opportunity for you to optimise the right mix of innovation efforts for your business and industry.
Recommendations
-
Innovation should create and deliver value so that outputs actually make it to market. You should focus your innovation efforts on building new features, offerings, and/or businesses in order to help you diversify your future revenue streams. The features, offerings, and business should result in live launches, user adoption and actionable lessons. The launches also help to create internal buy-in for continued investment.
-
You will have experienced this as a consumer. Some companies have explained how they've created an innovative feature, offering, or business; excitedly, you go to take a look and realise all they've done is take what used to be on a paper form and turn it into a website or app. Bemused, you poke fun at them, then get back to your day job of creating an innovative website or app for your company.
Outputs from innovation should be considered innovative by the press, by your friends and family, by your users, by your peers, and by other industries.
You might not consider your outputs innovative, but do others?
-
You believe your customers or users don't find your innovation efforts highly innovative. It's a high bar because most users don't throw around words like 'innovative', but when they do, they've had a magical experience.
You believe your global peers in your industry wouldn't hold you up to be the most innovative company. Your peers is the lowest benchmark to be considered innovative.
The simplest gut check for innovation is whether people get bored when you talk about your most innovative outputs and launches. Of course the problem could just be story telling, and a lot of under the hood innovation isn't exciting to the lay person, but we believe somebody with a reasonable understanding of what you've done should find your output/launch exciting.
What next?
We’re on a mission to help 1,000 corporates reinvent themselves to build the business of tomorrow.
We help corporates unlock the capability to reinvent themselves. Our approach is to build your internal teams into world-class innovation leaders and then leave them to it. We like to keep it simple with three stages to engage:
Inspire your leadership team to take action on innovation.
Build an optimal innovation portfolio & playbook to execute.
Coach your leaders to build innovation capabilities from within.
If you are passionate about innovation and are intrigued about the results in this report, the next step is to reach out to us to conduct a detailed assessment of your organisation’s innovation efforts. We’d love to help you join the 10% of corporates who are succeeding at effective innovation.