Innovation Capability Maturity Model

Patrick Corsi, Erwan Neau

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781848218277
• eBook ISBN: 9781119144359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mathematics
• Subtopic: Applied Mathematics
• Index: Mathematics

Whilst innovation remains of course an approach, a process, and is still often even reduced to a set of results, it essentially reflects a way of thinking evolution. Time is up for varying the thinking methods according to capacities and learned and available competencies with a view to change… the thinking level. No domain and no sector is immune to this transformation in todays' world Having clarified our ideas through this book, we remain ever more convinced that the leveled maturity approach will lead to real advances in innovation over the 2020 years. Hence the competitive capacities of organizations must evolve. As we strive in our quest for new inspiration sources in business, let us reckon that all is bound to evolving… including the way to evolve. In that resides the very capacity to innovate.

PART 1
Think Up a Method

1
Innovation: An Unfinished Journey

1.1. The journey as the end

There are two things man could not stop throughout history: technology and innovation. And over time, man has also expressed a need to define innovation more accurately. In most cases, innovation was first considered as an economic concept. Under King of France Louis XIV, Maréchal Turgot developed the term with clear productivity connotation, which takes us back to the 17th Century. One of the greatest economists of the 20th Century, Joseph Alloïs Schumpeter, even wrote in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy published in 1944, “Capital concentration tends to bureaucratize innovation and tends to dispossess the enterprise function from its deepest justification, which can question capitalism’s survival”.

However, toward the end of the past century, legendary management professor Peter Drucker deplored that innovation still remained for a lot of people a “flash of genius”, while it should rather be considered as “a systematic, organized and rigorous discipline” [DRU 02]. And we hold that the “genius inside” understanding still prevails.

Over the past few years, a surge of interest has been vested in widening the meaning of the word innovation: not just a term or a concept, but rather an entire field within a paradigm shift aiming at creating growth through a higher performance culture. However, to find the key to growth, it is necessary to look in the opposite direction and this is counterintuitive. The key to growth resides in the obsolescence of objects; because what is stable in an economy is neither the success of the day nor the established practice.

Following this approach, many organizations and even countries have defined themselves as ecosystems that cultivate innovation where they previously considered creative performance and innovation separately. This involves culture, which long used to be a word foreign to innovation. To quote the INSEAD 2011 Global Innovation Index [DUT 11] “The passion to innovate must eventually originate from the heart, where we can turn our dreams into reality without losing the essence of its unique and emotional selling properties”. What a departure from past product-based concepts! Yet, the same report acknowledges that “No international index makes a serious attempt to measure culture or creativity across nations”.

Although an evolving definition of innovation is what we probably need and desire and is debated with increasing intensity, the usage of its generic term loses precision as time goes on. Any innovative organization would be one that wants to alter a status quo with respect to its markets. Its medium, method, size or geographic localization would be irrelevant and the sector in which it operates not a constraint.

Yet, there is more to innovation than innovation itself. While innovative activity was the previous limited focus, transformative power goes beyond and should be sought. This sets a distinction between result (from innovative activities) and process (a transformative agent). The result is the tangible outcome of some “innovative phase”, and to become an innovative result it is supposed to somehow reach a usage, a market. That process is the story behind the innovative phase, accounting for eventual success or failure stories.

However, there exists a third pillar that supports innovation. It is often a result of peculiar elements characterizing those organizations that are famous for innovating, including the culture they have forged, the attitudes of their personnel, even the managerial behaviors they have nurtured internally. That kind of postmodern sophistication cannot be taken for granted.

When a company’s innovation is perceived as continuous, we see the above three components of innovation – process, result and culture – as merging. While academics would maybe wish to standardize innovation, a complete reference terminology is not widely available apart from some attempts [SHO 12] and professionals generally refer to their business insight and experience when innovating.

However, if innovation is said to correspond, as it should in our opinion, to a specific design process, the question that should be asked becomes “how to model such a design process?” In other words, how to account for a company that innovates and one that does not or does less. One problem is that the formulation of innovations may require new knowledge that has not been fully scoped. In other terms, innovation triggers a crisis of object identity, objects that may be of products or services, or of companies through their market positioning or their business model.

If information technologies are already operating like a business within a business, innovation models, methods, techniques and tools are already available. Perhaps, some organizations are already functioning in this way.

1.2. Application of maturity levels in the innovation process

Management science still tends to rest on an old paradigm that talks about closed worlds. Any new disciplines should breathe the thinking of openness, multiplicity to tools and no unnecessary opposition from them.

Our research during the 2000s found that an innovative situation is not a binary one, and there is no one-size-fits-all innovation process maturity level. Instead, several levels – we will call them innovation capability maturity levels – apply, and we actually identify five.

This book is focused on tracking the potential for innovating at each of these levels and accounts for the process specificities that signal a more or less capacity to innovate – something we will from now on dub “innovability”. By enabling an awareness of one’s innovability, it becomes easier to detect the pre- or postconditions for a given level and also to improve it. The first underpinning assumption is that the higher an innovability level is, the more you can grow competitiveness in markets – and in a sustainable manner. The second footing is that every level can be exploited maximally, which yields the best available build for further improving innovability. The improvement logic behind this is don’t do more, do better; don’t find more ways but a better one. These are the goals on climbing the innovability ramp with the best accelerating gradient.

For managing the innovation process, new responsible profiles appear revealing the centrality of innovation with corresponding job titles or positions such as Chief Innovation Officer, Director of Innovation, Innovation Pilot Committee or similar. Many possible roles in the company are actually legitimate and new processes, core to the enterprise, manifest the emergence of designing innovation, beyond process, result and culture.

The fact is that we depart from the old problem-solving paradigm of cognitive psychology, traditional creativity methods and other rationalized approaches. When you focus on the scenario method, you need to define the different scenario. Yet, a truly innovative approach gives you a blank sheet – an empty space. No problem-solving method can help as you start from a mathematically empty set. Of course, a vast knowledge exists that you may want to widely tap into. However, a terra incognita is that very new competitive frontier that companies need to grasp to become successful because they just do not have an a priori solution to hand. Simply solving problems would keep them to old views, definitions, patterns and habits. Many crafts and industries too, when a dominant design has reached success and the market responds by wanting more of same (i.e. consequently fixing the rules and closing further evolution), then fall into the non-innovating camp. They ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• List of Acronyms
• PART 1: Think Up a Method
• PART 2: A Discourse on the Method
• PART 3: Implementing the Method
• PART 4: Possessing the Method
• Appendix 1: APPENDICESA Recap of the Five Innovation Capability Maturity Levels
• Appendix 2: An Innovation Vade Mecum
• Appendix 3: On Using Innovation Tools According to Capability Maturity Level
• Appendix 4: A Basket of Examples for Innovation-centered Meetings
• Appendix 5: About Innovation Brakes: How to Avoid Errors that Others May Have Made Before
• Appendix 6: Linking up with the Strategic Management of Innovation
• Appendix 7: How to Understand and Value the C-K Theory for Maturing Your Innovation Capacity
• Appendix 8: How to Organize an Innovation CMM for Clients and Individual Practitioners
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Index
• End User License Agreement