Everyone wants innovation but how to does an enterprise go about actually fostering innovation for their business that has a lasting impact? Measure it! Which is an answer that commonly becomes conducting a traditional capability maturity assessment. To understand their current state, identify their target state, and define the actions needed to progress to the desired levels of competency. However, innovation is a unique and fiscal mistress that requires a specific set of dimensions to come together in just the right way; enter Gartner’s Innovation Management Maturity Model (IMMM).
To assess an enterprises innovation capability 6 key dimensions need to be understood:
- Strategy & Intent – Demonstration of intent to innovate through strategic commitment, funding, alignment of resources, and design of incentives.
- Processes & Practices – Formalization of process models to reliably generate ideas and manage them through to resolution (implementation, commercialization, termination, monetization, etc). All in the name of fostering business agility to drive creativity and the ability to act on thinking outside current boundaries.
- Culture & People – Understanding of social behaviors (whether customers, employees, or others) and managing the impact of these behaviors across the innovation process; an inclusive environment for recognizing value.
- Organization & Infrastructure – A variety of supporting organizational structures, resources, and tools that establish and sustain innovation management, with scale in mind, from ideation to implementation.
- Partnerships & Open Innovation – Active relationships and access to innovators and innovations that are both internal and external.
- Innovating How You Innovate – Ability to continually adapt and adopt relevant new ideas and practices.
Together these dimensions can provide insight as to what level of Innovation Management an enterprise is at:
- Level 1 -> Reactive
- Level 2 -> Active
- Level 3 -> Defined
- Level 4 -> Performing
- Level 5 -> Pervasive
While assessing against the IMMM, it is important to keep in mind that managing innovation and the act of innovating are not the same. While innovations may arise as the result of luck, opportunity or the force of a single creative personality, mature management is necessary to build an effective, repeatable and, in particular, lasting environment that fosters great ideas, discoveries and, ultimately, innovations. This maturity model is designed to assess the enterprise’s readiness to managing innovation as a repeatable and enduring competency (Fenn & Harris, 2011). Table 1 provides an overview of how this all comes together:
So now that an enterprises innovation maturity level can be understood, how do we act on it? In short, this is just the beginning. A current state understanding is instrumental for knowing where your areas of opportunity are but this all needs be orchestrated across your unique and complex environments. Enterprise Architecture is your friend here, use your IMMM results as an artifact to drive strategic decisions and influence stakeholders to change.
References:
- Fenn, J. & Harris, K. (2011). A Maturity Model for Innovation Management. Gartner.
