Three questions to gauge your company's innovation health: How many new products launched in the past year? Were they incremental or bold? Did ideas come from leadership or from frontline staff and customers? Bold ideas and some failures signal a healthy culture.
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I work with organizations to try and help them improve innovation, and very often one of the questions I'll start by asking early in a conversation with the senior executive or their team is, how many new products or services have you introduced to the market in the last 12 months? Now, there isn't a right answer, though none is plainly not a good answer, because it depends on many different circumstances, but the answers can still be revealing. And then the next question I ask is, how bold were the ideas? Were they big, brave ideas, or were they small incremental changes, improvements to existing products and services? And I like to hear that they had some bold ideas. Were they all successful? Many, many successful companies introduce a lot of bold ideas, many of which fail. And if everything you try succeeds, you're probably not being brave enough. So how many new products or services did you introduce? Were they bold enough? And then a follow-up question I like to ask is, where did the ideas for those new products or services come from? Where are the ideas for those innovations? And if all of the ideas came from the top person, the boss, the founder who started the whole enterprise, who's coming up with all the best ideas, that's not so good. I like to hear that some of the ideas came from customers or salespeople or marketing people, people close to the action, because that signals you've got a team who are entrepreneurial. who are innovative, and they are being listened to, and their best ideas are being implemented. So that's a really good sign. So those 3 questions: how many new products or services, are they bold enough, and where did the ideas come from? I think you'll find that a useful thing to talk about.
