Organizational Innovation

How do you define innovation?  While innovation has been defined in many ways, at its core, innovation refers to making productive use of new ideas.  Although intertwined, creativity and innovation are separate processes.  Creativity is the generation of novel ideas and is a necessary precursor to innovation, but by itself creativity is only half of the equation.  To be truly innovative an organization must also implement those ideas, and further, those implementations should lead to positive outcomes.  Therefore, we define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas.

Why should we measure our Innovation Factor^TM in addition to the Denison Model?  While the Denison Organizational Culture Survey measures many of the values and behaviors that are important to facilitating innovation, the Innovation Factor^TM focuses specifically on innovation and directly asks questions about creativity, the implementation of creative ideas, and the role that innovation plays in the organization. Asking these questions, along with the DOCS assessment, will allow you to see the strengths and weaknesses in your culture and how they impact the process of innovation.

How is innovation related to the Denison Model? Given a positive organizational culture facilitates the innovation process, many of the values and behaviors that promote innovation are captured already within the Denison model. Specifically, the Involvement trait measures an organization’s capacity to build capabilities and ownership in employees which is important to creativity. Second, organizations that are market and customer focused have a broad source of new ideas and are likely to be successful with implementation. These concepts are captured in the Adaptability trait of the Denison model.  Third, the Mission trait measures the extent to which there is a meaningful long-term direction which provides a road-map for the challenging journey of translating ideas into products and services.  Finally, the Consistency trait also plays a role as organizations must be able to reach agreement and have processes in place to be able to deliver on creative ideas.

The Innovation Factor^TM distinguishes itself from the Denison Model  by allowing your organization to specifically measure your organization’s commitment to innovation and assess whether you have the creativity and skill for the challenges ahead.

Read the report on the statistical validation of the Innovation Factor^TM and the normative benchmark database. more>>