"To make mistakes is human; to stumble is commonplace; to be able to laugh at yourself is maturity" - William Arthur Ward

If you've been following along with us long enough, you're likely to know a thing or two about innovation management.

Innovation Management is:

• A business process, not an event
• A business strategy for growth
• A business discipline that requires strong and effective leadership
• A business function that requires key resources (human, financial, time and space)

Like any good business process, strategy, discipline and/or function, it requires constant care and feeding through the involvement of dedicated people who are constantly growing, striving, taking risks, learning from failure, collaborating, sharing knowledge and facilitating growth in others.

Also, like any good business process, strategy, discipline and/or function, you seek to constantly and consistently improve your skill set or "maturity."  Improving your maturity improves your effectiveness.  Improving your effectiveness improves your operational excellence.  Improving your operational excellence improves your bottom line!

Innovation maturity is no different.  Maturity starts with an inward focus so you can understand where you are now, looking ahead to where you want to be in the future, and finally, putting together a logical roadmap of steps to get from point A to point B.

This chart represents the Think For A Change, LLC, Innovation Maturity Map...

                        We use this map to visually represent the stages of maturity growth most organizations take on their innovation management journey.

You can see that the organization moves through stages that build on a solid foundation of structure and resources, add right-sized processes and tools, begin to standardize on things that have been proven to work effectively, optimize the people, processes and technology along the way and finally, reach a state where innovation "just happens" because all of the required pieces and parts are in place and running effectively and efficiently.

More importantly though, and the instrumental tool for measuring existing innovation maturity, identifying key gaps and charting a course for innovation management maturity growth is the IM2 - Innovation Maturity Model matrix.  We rely heavily on this tool to help chart your course of structured and measurable growth.  We also have a number of consultation packages designed to help you get the most out of your maturity growth journey or to simply get your innovation management program established.

Think your company is innovative?  How about taking an honest assessment of your innovation maturity by reviewing our best practices maturity model?  You might discover that to reach the continuous innovation you desire, additional systems might be applicable in achieving a repeatable, reliable and truly embedded innovation program.