In our last Blog, we discussed innovation killers.  This moth, let's present seven themes of a successful innovative organization:

1. Ambition and Commitment:  The organization has and is able to articulate clarity of its strategy, the role of innovation it its strategy and, most important, the senior management walks the talk.
2. A Simple and Easily Understood Strategy and Innovation Process:  Insight and long term foresight combine to deliver a clear strategy and innovation pipeline that is visable to the organization.
3. Capability development:  Innovation skills are enhanced through hiring, training, broad exposure and mentoring.
4. Support Mechanisms:  The organization has systems in place to facilitate strategic implementation and innovation flow.
5. Motivation and Empowerment:  The entire organization is engaged in strategic alignment and innovation process via time, resources and rewards.
6. Experimentation and Risk-Taking (4 components): 
   1. The organization creates space for ideas to fail
   2. The organization ensures tight feedback loops to learn from failures
   3. The organization re-injects learnings from successes as well as failures back into the innovation process.
   4. The organization creates a culture of trust that failure is not punished
7. Customer Insight:  And from an Innovation Insights perspective, the most important - The ability to understand and articulate trends and customer latent needs both short and long term.

Judge how your organization stacks-up to these seven traits of an innovative organization.  For each of the statements (and the 4 sub-statements of number 6, determine how closely that describes your organization.  Give each statement a score of -2, -1, 0, +1 or +2, depending on how closely your organization matches the statement (+2) to the statement is far from describing your organization.  For any of the statements that have a 0 to -2 score, start looking for how you can move the score to the positive side.  This is not an easy task as muchis dependent on organization culture, but others have done it (e.g., IBM and P&G); your organization can also.

H. R. (Pent) Penton