Watch out! This article is quite fact driven! (but contains some very interesting information)

The most crucial elements to drive results in a company are 1). a corporate culture that supports innovation and 2). having an innovation strategy that is aligned with the overall company strategy. That’s the conclusion of Booz & Company’s Global innovation 1000 research.

Together these two elements outperform other ‘more commonly stated’ elements, like:

• a focused innovation strategy
• winning overall business strategy
• deep customer insight
• great talent within your organisation
• the right set of capabilities to achieve successful execution

How shocking it is to see some numbers: 47% of companies admit that their company’s culture does not support their innovation strategy and 36% of companies admit their innovation strategy does not match their company’s overall strategy.

And here it comes: Companies with both highly aligned cultures and highly aligned innovation strategies have a 30 percent higher enterprise value and 17 percent higher profit growth than companies with poor alignment!

In other words: Companies whose strategic goals are clear, and whose culture strongly support these goals have a huge advantage!

So what innovation strategies do they identify?

• Need seekers. Experts at mapping customer needs and possess the ability to translate these to products and services that fit these needs.
• Market readers. Mainly incremental innovation, mostly with a ‘fast follower’ strategy. They closely monitor competitors and customers.
• Technology drivers. Mostly R&D driven. Use their technological capabilities to drive both breakthrough and incremental innovation.

Need seekers seem to be performing the best of these strategies, with better performance on a product level, better aligned strategy and a supporting culture. And due to a special focus on ‘advantaged products and services’ and ‘openness to ideas from external sources’, they are able to create truly differentiated products by leveraging all potential sources of good ideas.

In short, this research shows that the needs seeker model may be the hardest to create, but is also most likely to deliver superior product differentiation, profitability and growth in enterprise value. Curious how you can build a needs seeker model? How to build an innovative culture? How to drive results through innovation? We’d love to tell you how we do it!

You can find the article here.