In case you missed it, a recent on-line poll conducted by Deloitte confirms the dismal state of innovation practice in companies. At a time when companies need to produce more vehicles for value delivery to climb out the financial doldrums, innovation is a vital force that can be brought to bear on the challenge. Yet, most companies are not prepared to meet the challenge. In the Deloitte poll, 31% of the executives surveyed indicated that innovation happens by accident in their company, and only 14% said that innovation is clearly defined within their company.

It is no wonder that many companies are struggling to get their arms around this innovation thing. Just last week, I visited with several leading companies, and questions around innovation, establishing repeatable innovation as a value-driving core competence, and building a sustainable, high-performance innovation culture were the key topics these companies wanted help with. Fortunately for these companies, they recognize that fundamental change is need if they are to emerge from the quagmire of accident innovation. Yet, many companies aren’t even aware that there is a problem in the organization and that there is a path to innovation success.

A couple years ago, an Innovation Practice Maturity Model was described in a post on Innovating To Win. This model has withstood the scrutiny of practice, so it seems timely to review the characteristics of each of the four stages of the model. Ask yourself, “Where does my organization fit in this model, and what should we be doing to advance our innovation capabilities?”

Stage I: Accidental Innovation
At this first stage, the organization has not begun implementing structured innovation. Companies are generally unaware that there exist approaches to achieve repeatable, on-demand innovation. Innovation is poorly, if at all, understood. Because these organizations do not recognize innovation as a competence that can be developed and harnessed, there is no infrastructure to support good innovation disciplines and no sponsorship to promote such practices. As a result, innovation is not repeatable, predictable or reliable, and ROI on investment in R&D falls well short of expectations.

Stage II: Situational Innovation
Organizations evolve to the second stage when awareness of structured innovation methods lead the organizations to test these methods. Limited investments in tools and methods are made to support a specific test case. A team is assembled to try out the new innovation methods in the context of a highly visible project. Narrowly focused knowledge asset mining may also be done in support of the project as well. While these initial projects are often highly successful, the momentum coming out of these projects is rarely leveraged because the organization is not yet committed to the path of innovation excellence. As a result, innovation skills are often not retained and must be rebuilt with each new iteration of trying out the concept of structured innovation.

Stage III: Repeatable Innovation
In this stage of innovation process maturity, the successes with early trials have led to genuine enthusiasm for the broader deployment of innovation best practices. The organization develops innovation specialists who become leveraged resources within the company and are assigned to projects on an as-needed basis. Investment in innovation infrastructure grows as both the innovation specialists are equipped with the proper tools, and the general knowledge worker population is given access to innovation tools and knowledge research technologies. While the company begins to experience the benefits of repeatable innovation, innovation is still opportunistic, targeting specific projects, and tends to be contained within pockets of the organization.

Stage IV: High-Performance Innovation
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