Services: Assessments
Innovation Foundation Profile
Background:
Let's define the term "innovation" and the basis for our Innovation Foundation Profile:
Innovation is the ability to generate creative ideas (for products, services, processes and the like), transform them into salable items and successfully insert them into the marketplace in a continuous fashion.
Here we need to make the distinction between an innovative product and an innovative company. While the former can be the "one trick pony" (the one shot wonder), the latter is an organization that continuously develops and launches new products that achieve a defined measure of market success. What is required for the single-shot is creativity and hard work. For the continuous stream of innovative products on the other hand, creativity and hard work, aided by a repeatable process - encompassing both technical and administrative activities - and a foundation that supports and nurtures consistent marketplace achievement are all required. The Innovation Foundation Profile focuses on your organization's foundational capability to become that innovative company or to sustain the enviable track record you may have already achieved.
What it Does:
People, Culture, and Structure comprise the organizational bricks of the Foundation for Innovation. These are combined with Process and Technology to complete the bricks and mortar of the foundation. The Profile also examines those foundational elements that are most closely associated with Corporate Strategy and Innovation Strategy. Without the appropriate in-concert strategies, inextricably linked, the best execution in the world will only get you to where you wind up and not where you intended, and needed, to go.
The Foundation for Innovation Profile is a proprietary assessment instrument that allows key personnel in your organization - all of whom are in some way involved with planning, directing, executing or assuring, in some way, your innovative future - to describe your innovation foundation. The Profile provides you the opportunity to define your foundation, and this is done in two dimensions; how you currently operate and then how you regard each of the foundation elements with respect to their importance to your future success.
Why it Can Help:
Customer Manufacturing Group has defined and converted these foundation elements (People, Culture, Structure, Process and Technology) into an environmental picture of what your innovation modus operandi looks like. This is accomplished without the participants initially knowing the overall shape or appearance of the structure they are describing. The Foundation for Innovation Profile gives you the blank pieces of the mosaic, you tell us what they look like, and we put them together to form the completed work. We add an analysis that shows your organization's potential for consistent innovative successes.
This picture can clarify the reasons for your successes - if you've had any - and the underlying foundational causes of your failures - if you've had any of these - and identifies what brick and mortar items must be strengthened for your (continued) innovative performance.
The Process is Part of the Picture:
The Innovation Foundation Profile questionnaire is no snap to complete. You didn't get where your are easily, be it successful or not, and likewise many of the questions will be challenging and difficult to answer; all are intended to be thought-provoking. The "mosaic"? You'll begin to see part of the picture you're constructing of your organization as you proceed. We'll be surprised if the questionnaire itself doesn't begin to form a new perspective for you.
How Do We Get Started?
First, you take the time to thoughtfully consider your organization's past innovative success(es) and its prospects for the future. If you feel there's something missing or amiss, or that in this highly competitive enterprise environment you must stay ahead, or get ahead, of the piranhas, contact Customer Manufacturing Group to discuss your situation. Perhaps the structured questions we will ask may in themselves provide you with some much-needed insight.
We will probably recommend that you begin the evaluation process by availing yourself of the Innovation Foundation Profile. You may only have an element or two in need of a minor tune-up, or you may have a systemic problem that is likely to re-appear time and again (and maybe already has). In either case, we'll assess your overall Innovation Foundation; we'll show you where the bricks are chipped or missing and where the mortar needs repair.
For More Information:
To help you determine if our process might apply to your situation, please see our white paper, The Foundation for Innovation. You can also e-mail Bayard.
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