The Challenge
Most organisations realities today are characterised by hyper competition and rapid changes in all forms, from customer demands to technological development. Consequently, competitive barriers to entry that were once considered permanent are gone and have been replaced by competitive advantages that continuously mutate.
This means it is increasingly difficult to set long-term mission, vision and strategies and adhere to them. Rather, setting long term objectives based on the adage "What are we really good at and how can we use it?” have become more relevant.
This reality forces a need for constant renewal and incremental enhancements, which are predicated on being innovative. Innovation is not just about product development, but also about incremental renewal of the business model, distribution, processes and the entire ecosystem around the organisation.
It is about developing and changing in order to meet evolving customer needs in a way that the competitors are not able to emulate. It is the company’s unique capabilities and strengths that determine its ability to do so.
Four years ago, Bearing launched the Innovation Navigator. The tool and accompanying methodology has been a major success in projects where we help corporations and other large or medium size organisations measure and improve their innovation capabilities.
The Innovation Navigator™ is used to measure and analyse the innovation capabilities and unique strengths of an organisation, and to help find the future sweet spots. We make the assessment by a combination of in-depth interviews with key people, and a computer based survey that is sent out to employees, customers, partners and suppliers. The survey presents a spider chart and also significant key figures based on a statistical analysis model. The system also provides for benchmarking, between respondent groups and over time.
A Navigator analysis focuses on four key areas: Offerings, Presence, Processes and Customers and gives an X-ray of the business, showing all aspects of the company’s innovation capabilities, perceived strengths and weaknesses, as well as giving a concrete mapping of the its unique or possible Sweet Spot. Based on this analysis, the organisation can establish a comprehensive strategy for enhancement of competitive advantages and profitable development and growth.
Innovation Navigator for Cluster Development
Since about one year, we are developing a new version, Innovation Navigator 2.0, which will also allow us to measure and support development of business clusters taking large number of stakeholders both inside and outside of the clusters into account.
This is a major step forward for Bearing, in combining our 15 year experience of regional development and place management with the modern tool for innovation capability development, and we aim to run pilot projects in two European countries in 2015. Watch this blog for regular updates.
