While three-quarters (77 percent) of respondents in a new business survey say they work in an environment where it is safe to fail in the name of innovation, 38 percent said their companies are not investing enough in innovation, 35 percent cited the lack of clear ownership, and 33 percent said the absence of a clear process were barriers.
According to the 2022 Innovation Trends Report Card from InnovationForce, a company developing a purpose-built SaaS-based platform to automate and democratize the innovation process, respondents said the COVID-19 pandemic did not impact their company’s ability to innovate.
“According to UNESCO, 2021 was a record-breaking year for the amount the world spent on R&D and innovation, for the first time reaching $1.7 trillion,” said Kim Getgen, InnovationForce founder and CEO, in a news release. “Yet 53 percent of our respondents said they did not have metrics to measure their innovation efforts. Only 23 percent said their organization had resources dedicated to innovation. This study highlights the gap technology can fill by automating, scaling, and accelerating innovation with a proven process, workflows, and dashboarding reporting.”
The report represents the views of a global community of innovators with workers on the frontlines of various company sizes and types. Over a year in the making, the study included a global survey and one-on-one interviews. Most of the 113 respondents work at privately held corporations in North America with 1,000 employees or more. Respondents’ roles were predominantly senior management, R&D, sales, marketing, engineering, and project management.
Below are highlights from the study:
- The survey revealed that most companies (83 percent) launch up to 10 products a year without a formalized product development process (62 percent).
- Innovation is moving toward inclusive, “all-in” cultures where there was overwhelming agreement that innovation belonged to everyone (33 percent). While most organizations want diversity and inclusion, without a clear “owner,” the innovation process cannot be efficiently managed and driven to completion.
- Culture was not identified as a key barrier. An overwhelming 78 percent said they worked in an environment where it was “safe to fail in the name of innovation,” and 51 percent said their organization valued experimentation. At the same time, half of the respondents agreed with the statement that their company had a lot of great ideas but could not execute them, indicating that execution, rather than culture, is the primary barrier to innovation.
- A key finding in the survey was that an overwhelming majority (53 percent) were unaware of any metrics their corporations used to measure innovation. The most common metric used was the percentage of revenue generated by the innovation (35 percent).
- 69 percent said COVID did not impact or saw no change in their companies’ ability to innovate during the global pandemic in 2021.
Download the full report here.
InnovationForce was launched within the energy industry, working with utilities that have the most urgent need to innovate faster now. Working together, InnovationForce and its customers and partners have established an impressive use case library to help utilities accelerate the adoption of decarbonization technologies, enable transportation electrification, improve grid resiliency, and prevent wildfires.
