Now more than ever CEOs Have Innovation on their Minds

It’s April. The flowers have bloomed in the Bay Area, the weather is getting warm, and I’m starting to eye the barbeque. There are lots of things to enjoy about this month, but one of my favorites is a bit out of the ordinary. It’s time for BCG’s annual most innovative companies report. Yes, I genuinely get excited about this!

The BCG report is one of my favorites because it’s based on a survey of 1,500 senior innovation executives from large enterprises. After digging into the report, there are some very positive data points worth noting:

• 75% of executives reported that innovation is a top-three priority at their companies; this was an increase of 10 percent from last year—the largest year-over-year increase in the history of the survey
• More than 60% of companies plan to boost investment in innovation, one-third of them significantly
• The top 50 most innovative companies outperformed global indexes on the basis of shareholder return by 17% last year (!)

The good news is that innovation is viewed as very important, it’s getting increased investment, and when done well it drives enterprise value. BCG observes that “CEOs are ramping up their companies’ efforts and investment, recognizing that innovation’s power to boost resilience and drive advantage is more important than ever.”

Here’s the bad news. Only 20% of survey respondents were judged as “ready to achieve a return on innovation investment, meaning a well-tuned innovation system that can transform good intentions into real value.” The report highlights the gap between a small minority of enterprises that excel and the majority that are still on a journey to transform their innovation process.

So what’s contributing to this gap? According to the report, it’s “innovation practices—capabilities related to moving a portfolio of projects to impact.”

As I was reading this I thought back to a case study that we published recently about our work with AstraZeneca. Their team observed that “they needed to address their data management practices, develop processes to follow through with external partnerships, improve internal communication and make it easier for teams to collaborate.” AstraZeneca was facing some of the exact challenges that the BCG survey respondents are highlighting. They adopted Startgrid to help overcome them.

At Startgrid we believe that purpose-built software can address the process and collaboration challenges that are often major obstacles to effective innovation. The BCG report highlights the rewards for making that investment.