The past year has highlighted the vast differences among companies as it relates to innovation. For some companies, innovation has accelerated through enhanced digital offerings, new partnerships, or tools to address the new remote working environment. For others, challenges with the supply chain, increased competition, a shift in focus on incremental improvements, among other circumstances, has created an innovation deficit.
This series of articles, interviews, and mini-reports are developed to help leaders as we enter a new era of innovation.
This mini-report includes data from a survey fielded in September 2021. Our 203 respondents were largely from North America (63 percent), with responsibilities in innovation, management, strategy, R&D, corporate ventures and IT (80 percent), and at Director level or above (76 percent).
Navigating emerging technology in today’s dynamic environment can be challenging. Given factors such as the ever-changing global startup ecosystem, established tech vendors using their market clout to promote big bets, customers demanding frictionless 24/7 accessibility, and the uncertainty of supply chain disruptions, companies need to be able to clearly define the problems to solve and the customer experiences they want to create.
This mini-report includes data from a survey fielded in March and April 2021. Our 244 respondents were largely from North America (63 percent), from companies with more than $1 billion a year in revenue (64 percent), and at the Director level or above (70 percent).
When asked about organizational agility, the majority of our respondents likened their organizations to a cruise ship or supertanker. The larger the organization, the harder it is to maneuver and respond quickly.
This mini-report includes data from a survey fielded in July 2020. Our 165 respondents were largely from North America (55 percent), from companies with more than $1 billion a year in revenue (52 percent), and at the Director level or above (67 percent). We found that 59 percent of respondents said that their team’s mandate had changed this year to include new activities or objectives—including things like fostering diversity and inclusion, redesigning the supply chain, innovating for “the new low-touch reality,” and making workplace modifications.
This mini-report includes data from a survey fielded in September 2020 and a set of qualitative interviews conducted in the same timeframe. We received 211 qualified survey responses, largely from North America (62 percent), at the director level and above (74 percent), and from companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue (59 percent). Encouragingly, we found that quality of alignment between the innovation and R&D groups in large companies and the C-level leaders who oversee them has been either improving (40 percent) or staying the same (45.5 percent of respondents) in 2020.
