Innovation Readiness Assessment: Is Your Organization Built to Innovate?

Most companies say they want innovation. Very few have built the organizational conditions for it to actually work. I see the same pattern across industries: a company buys a methodology, runs workshops, hires an innovation team. Six months later, nothing has changed.

The problem is almost never the tools. It’s readiness.

In 25 years of working with industrial and B2B companies on innovation strategy, facilitating over 100 Business Model Canvas sessions with organizations ranging from family businesses to multi-billion-euro industrials, this is the first thing I check before recommending any methodology or workshop: whether the organization is actually ready to use it.

This guide gives you a practical framework to score your organization across nine dimensions on a 1 to 5 scale, identify your weakest areas, and understand the right sequence for fixing them. It won’t replace a facilitated assessment with your leadership team. No self-assessment can. But it will tell you where to look.

That’s worth knowing before you invest another euro in innovation programs.

What Is an Innovation Readiness Assessment?

An innovation readiness assessment is a structured diagnostic that evaluates whether the organizational conditions exist for innovation to work. It asks: do you have the leadership support, organizational design, and innovation practice capabilities that successful innovation requires?

It is not a measure of how innovative your culture feels, or how many innovation initiatives you have running, or whether your leadership team says innovation is a priority. It measures what actually happens when someone tries to innovate inside your company.

The assessment I use here evaluates nine dimensions across three levers: leadership support, organizational design, and innovation practice. Each dimension gets a score from 1 (beginner) to 5 (world class). The total score — out of 45 — tells you where you stand and, more importantly, where your binding constraints are.

The Gap Between Innovation Ambition and Innovation Capability

Studies consistently show that the vast majority of companies view innovation as a top strategic priority. A much smaller fraction have the organizational conditions to act on that priority. The gap between ambition and capability is where innovation goes to die.

This isn’t a new finding. It’s been documented across industries for decades. What makes it stubborn is that the gap is usually invisible from inside the organization. Leadership teams see the vision, the budget, the workshop series, the innovation team they hired. They assume this adds up to innovation capability. Often it doesn’t.

Here’s the pattern I see repeatedly: a company buys an innovation methodology, runs a series of workshops, and expects innovation to happen. Six months later, nothing has changed. The tools are gathering dust. The workshops are a memory. The same people are doing the same work in the same way.

The problem isn’t the tools. It’s the readiness.

Three things typically explain the gap:

Confusing activity with capability. Running workshops is not the same as having innovation capability. Posting an “innovation values” poster is not the same as having an innovation culture. The assessment cuts through the activity to examine what’s actually structurally in place.

Starting with tools instead of conditions. Most organizations start with methodology: they buy a tool, hire a consultant, or send people to training. But tools only work when the conditions are right. You can teach someone to use the Business Model Canvas in an afternoon. Whether they can actually use it to drive change inside your organization depends entirely on readiness factors; leadership support, protected time and resources, a reward system that doesn’t punish experimentation.

Applying Exploit logic to Explore work. Most established companies are excellent at optimizing and running existing business models. That capability — what researchers call an Exploit culture — is a genuine asset. The problem comes when they try to innovate using the same rules that govern their core business. Innovation requires different conditions. The assessment identifies where the Exploit rules are blocking Explore work.

The Two Cultures Every Established Company Needs

Before scoring your organization, you need to understand the core tension that makes innovation so hard inside established companies.

Every organization needs two fundamentally different operating modes:

An Explore culture — for discovering, testing, and building new business models. High uncertainty. Iterative. Failure-tolerant. Fast. The goal is to reduce risk by finding out what works, not to execute what you already know works.

An Exploit culture — for managing, optimizing, and growing existing businesses. Low uncertainty. Sequential. Failure-averse. Precise. The goal is to execute efficiently and predictably.

These two cultures are fundamentally opposed. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Most established companies have a strong Exploit culture. They built it over decades, and it’s what keeps the business running. That Exploit culture is a genuine asset, don’t destroy it. A manufacturing company that can deliver 50.000 units on spec and on time has built something real.

But when those same companies try to innovate using Exploit rules (demanding detailed business plans with three-year financial projections, punishing experiments that don’t deliver as promised, measuring innovation teams on revenue from day one) they kill innovation before it starts.

The goal isn’t to choose one culture over the other. Researchers call the solution an ambidextrous organization: one that can explore the future while exploiting the present. That requires specific organizational conditions. Which is exactly what this assessment measures.

The Innovation Readiness Framework: Three Levers, Nine Dimensions

The framework I use is based on research from The Invincible Company and the Strategyzer innovation culture framework, adapted through my own practice working with industrial and B2B companies.

Innovation readiness breaks down into three levers, each with three dimensions. Nine dimensions total.

Lever 1: Leadership Support

Innovation doesn’t happen without active leadership involvement. Not lip service. Not occasional keynote speeches about disruption. Active, time-consuming, budget-allocating involvement. The kind that makes it clear to everyone in the organization that innovation is a genuine strategic priority, not a program that will be quietly canceled when quarterly numbers slip.

Strategic Guidance — Does leadership provide clear, explicit strategic direction for innovation? Not “we need to be more innovative”, but a specific strategy that tells teams where to focus, which bets to make, and what success looks like. When everyone in the organization can describe the innovation strategy, this is working. When five people give five different answers, it isn’t.

Resource Allocation — Are resources for innovation institutionalized and protected, or bootstrapped and vulnerable? The test: what happens to the innovation budget when a bad quarter hits? If it’s the first thing cut, your resources aren’t protected. Organizations at the high end of this dimension have leaders who commit at least 50% of their personal time to innovation, not just signing off on it from a distance.

Portfolio Management — Does leadership actively manage a portfolio of innovation bets across different time horizons, from incremental improvements to transformative new business models? Or is “the innovation portfolio” a vague concept that describes whatever a few teams happen to be working on? Leadership portfolio management means knowing how many initiatives are at what stages, with what investment levels, and actively making decisions about which to continue, which to pivot, and which to kill.

Lever 2: Organizational Design

The way your company is structured either enables or blocks innovation. This isn’t about having an “innovation lab”, almost every large company has one, and most of them produce little of strategic value. It’s about where innovation sits in the org chart, how much power it has, and how it connects to the rest of the business.

Legitimacy and Power — Does innovation have official status, resources, and influence in your organization? Or is it skunk work happening in the margins, dependent on passionate individuals and informal permission? When the head of innovation needs something from the CFO or a business unit leader, does it happen? Or does it go to the bottom of a queue behind “real” business priorities? Power and legitimacy are uncomfortable concepts in organizational discussions but they determine whether innovation can actually function.

Bridge to the Core — Can innovation teams access the customers, brand, skills, and infrastructure of the core business? Or are they walled off, either by neglect or by organizational politics? This dimension captures one of the most common failure modes: innovation teams isolated enough to be “protected” from bureaucracy, but also isolated from the assets that give the company its actual competitive advantage. At the high end, there are clear policies, not informal favors, that govern how innovation and core operations collaborate as equal partners.

Rewards and Incentives — Does your incentive system reward experimentation and new value creation? Or does it only reward execution and delivery? In most organizations, going into innovation is a career risk. If a failed experiment counts against someone’s performance review, if there’s no bonus structure for innovation work, if the promotion track runs through operations rather than exploration, your reward system is actively blocking innovation. I’ve seen this kill more innovation programs than any other single factor.

Lever 3: Innovation Practice

Even with leadership support and the right organizational structure, innovation requires specific capabilities: proven tools, dedicated processes, and people with skills that most operational managers haven’t developed.

Innovation Tools — Are proven innovation methodologies, such as business model design, lean startup, design thinking, actually adopted and used across your organization? Or did people attend a workshop once and never touch the tools again? There’s a meaningful difference between “we use the Business Model Canvas” and “we used it at an offsite three years ago.” Adoption in one department, or in one workshop series, doesn’t constitute organizational capability.

Process Management — Do you have dedicated processes for testing business ideas and reducing risk? Or does innovation follow the same stage-gate process as everything else. The one that requires a detailed business plan before any money moves? This matters because the stage-gate process is optimized for executing known ideas, not for discovering unknown ones. When someone proposes a genuinely new business idea, the first thing they’re asked for is a three-year financial projection. That process is designed for the Exploit world, and it kills Explore work. Innovation processes should measure risk reduction through systematic testing, not forecast accuracy.

Innovation Skills — Do you hire, develop, and retain people with specific innovation skills? Or do you expect operational managers to innovate on the side of their day jobs? Innovation requires three distinct skill sets: business design (shaping business models and value propositions), testing and learning (running experiments to reduce risk), and leading innovation teams through uncertainty. Most operational managers have none of these. Expecting them to innovate on top of their existing responsibilities is like expecting an accountant to perform surgery because they’re both professionals.

What Are You Assessing Readiness For?

Not all innovation is the same. Your organization needs readiness across three types, each with different uncertainty levels and different requirements from the nine dimensions above.

Efficiency Innovation — Improving how your existing business runs. Lower uncertainty, smaller impact, mostly done inside the core business. Process optimization, cost reduction, incremental product improvements. Most established companies are already reasonable at this because it uses Exploit culture skills. Low readiness scores are less damaging here.

Sustaining Innovation — Expanding your proven business model into new segments, channels, or geographies. Medium uncertainty, potentially substantial impact. New market entry with an existing product, or adding significant new features. This is where many companies start to struggle because it requires some Explore thinking within an Exploit framework.

Transformative Innovation — Building entirely new business models that may cannibalize or be unrelated to your current business. Maximum uncertainty, potentially game-changing impact. The industrial manufacturer that builds a digital services platform alongside its physical products. This is where readiness matters most and where most organizations fail because they try to run transformative innovation with Exploit rules. Manufacturing companies face additional structural constraints here: capital intensity, long product cycles, and OEM relationships all make transformative innovation harder. I cover those constraints and how to score your manufacturing company specifically in Innovation Readiness for Manufacturing.

A company that scores well on this assessment can operate across all three types simultaneously. A company that scores poorly is effectively locked into efficiency mode, which works until the market shifts underneath them.

Score Your Organization: The Innovation Readiness Self-Assessment

Rate your organization on each of the nine dimensions using the 1–5 scale below. Score what’s actually true, not what you’d like to be true. If in doubt, err conservative. Optimistic scoring defeats the purpose.

Scoring Scale

Lever 1: Leadership Support

Dimension 1: Strategic Guidance

Score 1: Leadership does not provide explicit strategic guidance for innovation. Innovation is mentioned as a value or aspiration, but there is no specific strategy anyone could act on.

Score 3: There is some strategic guidance for innovation, but not everyone in the company knows it. It exists at the top but doesn’t translate into clear direction for teams.

Score 5: Leadership provides strategic innovation guidance at important meetings and everyone in the company knows it. Teams can explain the innovation strategy without looking it up.

The diagnostic question: Ask five people in different departments and different seniority levels what the company’s innovation strategy is. If you get five different answers, or blank stares, you’re at a 1 or 2.

Dimension 2: Resource Allocation

Score 1: Resources for innovation are bootstrapped or allocated on an ad-hoc project basis. Teams have to justify their existence each budget cycle.

Score 3: Resources for innovation are available, but they’re not substantial and not protected from cuts when the business is under pressure.

Score 5: Resources for innovation are institutionalized and protected. Leaders commit at least 50% of their personal time to innovation work, not just oversight.

The diagnostic question: What happened to the innovation budget during the last difficult quarter or difficult year? If it was cut before anything else, your resources are not protected, regardless of what the strategy documents say.

Dimension 3: Portfolio Management

Score 1: Leadership is mainly focused on improving the core business. Investment in exploring new business models is minimal and unsystematic.

Score 3: The company makes some investments to explore the future, but portfolio management isn’t systematic. Individual projects are funded; a portfolio is not actively managed.

Score 5: Leadership actively manages a large innovation pipeline of small bets at different stages of development. The best-validated bets receive follow-up investment. There are explicit criteria for what advances and what gets killed.

The diagnostic question: Can your leadership team describe the innovation portfolio right now, how many initiatives, at what stages, with what investment levels, and with what decisions pending? If the answer is “we have a few projects somewhere,” you’re at a 2.

Lever 2: Organizational Design

Dimension 4: Legitimacy and Power

Score 1: Innovation projects are skunk work, outside official channels, dependent on informal permission and passionate individuals with other jobs.

Score 3: Innovation is officially in the org chart, but it lacks real power and influence. It can run programs, but can’t make things happen across business units.

Score 5: Innovation sits at the top of the org chart and has genuine power and influence. The head of innovation has direct access to the CEO and can mobilize resources across the organization.

The diagnostic question: When the head of innovation asks the CFO or a business unit leader for something, access to customers, engineering resources, a budget line, does it happen within a week? Or does it go into a queue?

Dimension 5: Bridge to the Core

Score 1: Innovation teams have limited or no access to the customers, data, brand, and skills of the core business. They work in isolation.

Score 3: Core business and innovation teams collaborate, but there are ongoing conflicts — over resources, over priorities, over who owns what. Collaboration happens through informal relationships, not policy.

Score 5: There are clear policies that govern how innovation teams and the core business collaborate as equal partners. Innovation teams can access what they need without navigating three layers of approval.

The diagnostic question: Can your innovation team get a meeting with your top 10 customers next week? Can they use the company brand? Can they access engineering resources? If the answer involves “only after approval from,” count the layers.

Dimension 6: Rewards and Incentives

Score 1: Innovation has no dedicated incentive system. People are evaluated and rewarded exactly as they would be in operational roles, which means experimentation and failure count against them.

Score 3: There are some incentives in place for innovation, but they’re not systematically different from the core business rewards. The innovation bonus is smaller than the operational bonus, or it’s tied to the same revenue metrics.

Score 5: Innovation has a dedicated incentive system that rewards experimentation, learning, and new value creation, explicitly different from the rewards for operational delivery.

The diagnostic question: If a high-performing manager joins the innovation team and the first project fails, as most innovation projects do, what happens to their career? If the answer is “it depends” or “it’s a risk,” you have a design problem. Career risk is the single most powerful signal your organization sends about how much it actually values innovation.

Lever 3: Innovation Practice

Dimension 7: Innovation Tools

Score 1: The company does not use business model design, lean startup, or design thinking tools for innovation work. Innovation happens through intuition and experience.

Score 3: Business model, lean startup, or design thinking tools are used in pockets of the organization, by one team, in specific workshops, or during certain phases of projects. Adoption is inconsistent.

Score 5: Innovation tools are widely adopted and genuinely mastered across the organization. People use the Value Proposition Canvas in their daily work, not just in offsite workshops.

The diagnostic question: When was the last time someone used a Business Model Canvas or similar tool outside of a workshop context to actually make a decision? If the answer is “at the workshop last year,” adoption is not happening.

Dimension 8: Process Management

Score 1: All processes are linear and require detailed business plans with financial projections. Innovation ideas must compete for resources using the same criteria as the core business.

Score 3: The company occasionally uses iterative processes and runs systematic experiments to test business ideas. But it’s the exception, not the standard approach.

Score 5: Processes are optimized for innovation. The company systematically measures risk reduction in new ideas, tracking what assumptions have been tested and what’s been learned, not just milestone completion and budget adherence.

The diagnostic question: When someone proposes a genuinely new business idea, what’s the first thing they’re asked to produce? A three-year financial projection means your process is designed for Exploit work. A description of the key assumptions that need testing means you’re on the right track.

Dimension 9: Innovation Skills

Score 1: The company does not hire for innovation skills and does not develop them. Innovation is expected from people with operational backgrounds, on top of their day jobs.

Score 3: The company occasionally hires experienced innovation talent and trains some specialized staff. But innovation skills are concentrated in a few individuals rather than distributed across the organization.

Score 5: The company hires and develops world-class innovation talent with deep experience. Innovation skills, such as business design, experimentation, managing uncertainty, exist across multiple teams and seniority levels.

The diagnostic question: Name three people in your organization with demonstrated experience running business experiments, designing value propositions, or managing early-stage innovation portfolios. If you can name them, ask whether their skills are being used systematically or are locked in one team.

Calculate Your Innovation Readiness Score

Add up your nine dimension scores:

What Your Score Means

9–18: Not Ready — The Foundation Is Missing

Your organization is running on Exploit culture alone. Innovation either isn’t happening, or it’s happening in the margins without real support. This isn’t unusual; most established companies land here when they assess honestly.

The problem with this stage is that launching innovation programs into this environment doesn’t work. You can run workshops, hire an “innovation manager,” and buy subscriptions to innovation software. Without the foundation, these investments produce activity but not capability. I’ve seen companies spend €500,000 on innovation programs at this readiness level and have nothing to show for it two years later.

What to focus on: Leadership alignment on an innovation strategy. Get your top team in a room and have an honest conversation about whether innovation is a genuine strategic priority or a nice-to-have. If it’s genuine, commit to specific resources and a specific strategy. If it’s a nice-to-have, be honest about that too, it’s better than pretending.

19–27: Getting Started — Pockets of Innovation Exist

You have some elements in place, but they’re not connected or systematic. Innovation is probably happening in one department or driven by one champion. This is a fragile state: when the champion leaves, innovation typically dies with them.

The risk of investing heavily at this stage is that you’re building on an unstable foundation. You might have a great innovation team but no protected budget. You might have a budget but no reward system that makes it attractive for talented people to join the team. You might have enthusiasm at the top but no clear strategy for teams to act on.

What to focus on: Identify your two lowest-scoring dimensions. Those are your binding constraints. Fix the structural blockers before investing in more programs, tools, or training.

28–36: Building Capability — The Engine Is Running

You have genuine innovation capability. The challenge now is scaling it and connecting it to the core business. Companies at this stage often struggle with what I call the “bridge problem”; getting innovation and operations to work together rather than competing for resources and attention.

This is where innovation portfolio management becomes important. Once you have enough innovation activity, you need a governance system to decide which innovations to scale, which to pivot, and which to kill. Without it, you end up with a portfolio of underfunded projects that linger indefinitely without ever achieving scale.

What to focus on: Build the governance system. Clarify the criteria for advancing, pivoting, and killing innovation initiatives. Establish the connection between the innovation portfolio and the company’s strategic priorities.

37–45: World Class — Others Learn from You

Very few companies score here, and if you do, you probably already know it. The challenge at this stage is maintaining this capability as the organization grows and as successful innovations transition from Explore mode to Exploit mode.

The most common failure mode at this level is complacency; the belief that because innovation worked in the past, it will continue working without active management. Innovation capability requires continuous investment and attention. The conditions that made it work can erode quietly over time, especially during growth phases when Exploit demands increase.

What to focus on: Continuously reinvest. Monitor the health of the organizational conditions, not just the outputs of innovation activity. World-class innovation readiness is a practice, not a destination.

The Blockers That Kill Innovation Before It Starts

Even if your overall score is reasonable, one or two critical blockers can stop innovation cold. As Gary Pisano noted in Harvard Business Review, innovative cultures require paradoxical combinations: tolerance for failure combined with high standards, willingness to experiment combined with discipline, psychological safety combined with brutal candor. These combinations are hard to build. Here are the blockers I encounter most consistently.

Leadership Support Blockers

Short-term focus. Leaders talk about innovation in strategy meetings but prioritize quarterly results when it matters. Innovation gets mentioned in the annual report and quietly deprioritized in the quarterly planning cycle. The tell: how long does it take for an innovation budget to get approved or cut?

No explicit strategy. There’s no innovation strategy, or it’s so vague that no one can act on it. “We need to be more innovative” is not a strategy. “We’re building three new business models in the mobility space over the next five years, with €2M/year in protected investment, and we’ll kill anything that doesn’t show proof of concept within 18 months” is a strategy.

Emotional lock-in to the current model. Leadership is invested (financially, professionally, and psychologically) in the current business model and resists genuine exploration of alternatives. This is especially common in companies where the current model has been very successful. Success creates confidence that the existing approach is right. That confidence is useful for execution; it’s dangerous for exploration.

Organizational Design Blockers

Reward system blocks risk-taking. The incentive system is calibrated for managing and improving the existing business. There is no career path through innovation, no bonus for successful experiments (as opposed to successful delivery), and real career risk for failing publicly. This is the blocker I see most often and the one that’s hardest to fix quickly.

Innovation teams lack autonomy. Even dedicated innovation teams get slowed by the same operational processes, approval chains, and reporting requirements as the core business. They need to run experiments fast and cheaply; they get three months of internal approval cycles before they can talk to a customer.

No access to core business assets. The most valuable thing an established company can give an innovation initiative is access to its existing assets: customer relationships, brand credibility, technical infrastructure, distribution channels. When innovation teams can’t access these without extensive negotiation, they’re competing against startups without startups’ speed advantage.

Innovation Practice Blockers

No dedicated team. Nobody has innovation as their sole job description. It’s always “in addition to” operational responsibilities. People prioritize what they’re measured on, and what they’re measured on is the core business.

Wrong processes. Innovation runs through the same stage-gate process as core business projects. This process is designed for executing known ideas with predictable returns. Applied to innovation, where the whole point is that you don’t yet know what will work, it kills good ideas early (they can’t produce three-year projections) and funds bad ideas late (the ones with confident-sounding financial models).

Lack of customer access. Innovation teams can’t talk to customers directly. They rely on filtered market research, sales team anecdotes, or internal assumptions. Customer access is non-negotiable for testing business ideas. Without it, you’re innovating in the dark.

How to Identify Your Specific Blockers

Look at your lowest-scoring dimensions. For each one, ask two questions:

1. What behaviors do we actually see? Not what we want to see, but what happens when someone tries to innovate? What do people do when a project hits a roadblock? What do managers do when a team wants to run an experiment?
2. What structural factors produce those behaviors? Formal policies, incentive systems, reporting structures, meeting rituals, budget processes. What in your organization’s design makes those behaviors likely?

This is the Culture Map approach: trace backwards from outcomes to behaviors to enablers and blockers. It works because it focuses on observable evidence rather than opinion.

What to Fix First: The Right Sequence

You can’t fix everything at once. After 25 years of doing this work, here’s the sequence I consistently recommend.

Step 1: Fix Leadership Support (Dimensions 1–3)

Nothing else works without this. If your leadership team doesn’t provide clear strategic guidance for innovation, allocate protected resources, and actively manage the innovation portfolio, any investment in organizational design or innovation practice is wasted. These investments will either never be used or will get cut at the first sign of business pressure.

This doesn’t mean every leader needs to become an innovation champion. It means the top of the organization needs to make explicit, public decisions about where innovation fits in the company’s future and back those decisions with time and money.

I’ve seen companies try to skip this step. They invest in innovation labs, send people to training, and hire a Chief Innovation Officer, while the CEO is focused exclusively on the core business. The innovation activity produces nothing of strategic value, and two years later the lab gets closed and the CIO leaves.

Step 2: Address the Worst Blockers in Organizational Design (Dimensions 4–6)

Once leadership support is in place, address the structural blockers. The most common priority fix is the rewards system. If going into innovation is career suicide for a talented manager, no rational person will choose it. Fix that first; create an incentive system that makes the risk acceptable.

Then address legitimacy (give innovation official status and a real place in the org chart) and the bridge to the core (create policies, not informal goodwill, that let innovation teams access the customers and resources they need).

Step 3: Build Innovation Practice (Dimensions 7–9)

Only after Steps 1 and 2 are addressed should you invest heavily in tools, processes, and skills. This is where most companies want to start; buying tools, sending people to workshops, hiring innovation managers. But without the structural foundation, these investments underperform dramatically.

When the conditions are right, adopt proven methodology: the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas for business design, systematic testing processes that measure risk reduction, and development programs for actual innovation skills, not just two-day workshops in design thinking.

The Honest Limitation of Self-Assessment

I need to be direct about something: a self-assessment can tell you where to look, but it can’t tell you what you’ll find.

Every leadership team I’ve worked with has blind spots. They score themselves a 3 on “Rewards and Incentives” because they have an innovation bonus program, while their employees score it a 1 because the bonus is tiny compared to the career penalty for a failed project. They score themselves a 4 on “Bridge to the Core” because the policy says innovation teams can access resources, while innovation teams score it a 2 because every request takes six weeks and three escalations.

The gap between leadership’s self-assessment and the rest of the organization’s experience is often the most important finding. It doesn’t mean leadership is dishonest. It means they’re not seeing what their people are experiencing. Trusting the leadership-only view is one of the most common innovation readiness mistakes I see.

Self-assessment is a starting point, not a conclusion. It tells you which dimensions to investigate. The real assessment happens when you sit down with a cross-section of your organization, not just leadership, and have an honest conversation about what actually happens when someone tries to innovate.

That’s what a facilitated workshop is for.

From Assessment to Action

You’ve scored your organization. Now what?

If your score is below 20: Start with a leadership alignment session. Get your top team in a room and have a real conversation about whether innovation is a genuine strategic priority or a stated one. If it’s genuine, commit to specific resources, a specific strategy, and a specific structure, before investing in any programs or tools.

If your score is 20–30: You have something to work with. Identify your two biggest blockers and create a 12-month plan to address them. Focus on structural changes (leadership support, organizational design) before investing in more capability building.

If your score is above 30: You’re in a strong position. The focus now is governance, how you manage the innovation portfolio at scale. The innovation portfolio management question becomes central: which initiatives get more investment, which get pivoted, which get killed?

The Innovation Readiness Workshop

If you want to go deeper than a self-assessment, I facilitate Innovation Readiness Workshops with leadership teams. The format is one day with the senior team. Ideally with input from a broader cross-section of the organization beforehand.

In that day, we work through four things:

Full assessment with cross-functional input. Not just leadership’s perspective — the full picture of what’s actually happening in the organization. The gaps between what leadership believes and what others experience are often where the most important findings live.

Blocker and enabler mapping. Using the Culture Map approach, we trace specific behaviors back to the structural factors that produce them. This gives you a diagnosis you can act on, not a list of cultural aspirations.

Priority identification. With nine dimensions and limited time and resources, you need to know which two or three structural changes would have the biggest impact. The workshop produces that clarity.

12-month roadmap. Specific actions, owners, and milestones. Not another report. A shared plan that comes out of a conversation your whole leadership team had together.

The result isn’t insight — it’s alignment. When your leadership team reaches the same diagnosis through evidence and conversation, you can move. When it’s handed to them in a report, you can’t.

If you’re considering whether a workshop makes sense for your situation, request your Strategy Call.