Innovation Capability Matrix

FALL 2026

The continuously shifting landscape makes it increasingly important to place innovation at the center of your organization. The Innovation Capability Matrix provides insight into how innovative your organization is and identifies the key opportunities for growing stronger.

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Category	Dimensions	Key Questions	Emerging	Evolving	Established
Maturity stage definitions			Emerging indicates the organization is in the initial stage of developing its processes, structures, and strategies. Change and improvements are sporadic and non-standardized, often reactionary to immediate needs rather than a result of strategic planning. There is typically a lack of formal systems and processes in place, which can lead to inconsistent results and inefficiencies. Innovation never gets out.	Evolving indicates that positive developments are occurring within the organization, but these changes are happening organically rather than through systematic, planned efforts. Innovation is often seen in isolated pockets or individual silos of the organization. Innovation gets out, but the outcome is less than anticipated.	Established indicates the organization has advanced to a stage where its innovation processes, strategies, and improvements are fully integrated and systematically managed. Changes are well-planned, strategically aligned, and consistently implemented across the entire organization. The organization can anticipate market trends and internal challenges, adapting proactively with established mechanisms to ensure sustained growth and stability. Innovation gets out and innovations build on each other.
STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT Achieving the organization's long-term goals and objectives	Vision	What's the North Star vision? How does the organization define innovation and its purpose? What and how is the innovation strategy helping to execute on corporate strategy? Is innovation oriented towards savings and internal efficiency, oriented toward revenue, sales, marketing, or oriented towards building?	Long-term strategic vision of the company is not communicated and leadership is focused on short-term gains. Employees' everyday work is not motivated by the vision and mission of the organization.	Long-term strategic vision of the organization is beginning to be communicated more consistently, but with occasional gaps in clarity and comprehension. Leadership is starting to prioritize longer-term goals alongside short-term objectives. Employees are becoming more engaged and aligned with the organization's vision and mission, though there is room for improvement in creating a stronger connection to their everyday work.	There is an integrated portfolio with a clear line to North Star vision. The North Star vision and strategy is communicated and well-understood. Engaged employees understand and believe in the company’s vision and strategy.
	Ambition	What is innovation's mandate within the organization? What's the organization's willingness to cannibalize an existing offering with a substitute offering?	The organization is seeking to avoid falling behind competitors and trends.	The organization is looking to seek parity with industry benchmarks and consensus best practices. The organization feels most comfortable being a fast follower.	The organization seeks to set trends, create markets, and disrupt itself.
	Prioritization	How is innovation prioritized within the organization? How is innovation funded? Does leadership have skin in the game for getting innovative ideas to market?	No criteria exist for what to work on. Innovation is viewed as a cost center. Innovation initiatives are leadership pet projects, with little to no rationale.	Innovation has a commercial mandate.	Innovation is managed in a risk-balanced portfolio across horizons
	Metrics	How is innovation measured? What are the KPIs for innovation?	There are no innovation-specific success criteria or metrics. The target is to change ways of working and it's not measurable. Quality of ideas is measured in terms of quantity of ideas. There is a data-driven myopia where the organization will only pursue innovation that can be measured.	Some basic innovation-specific success criteria or metrics are being identified and sporadically used across the organization. There are post-mortem analysis of initiatives that have failed.	There are innovation-specific success criteria or metrics. These metrics are integrated into the overall strategic objectives, influencing decision-making and guiding continual improvement.
CUSTOMER-CENTRICITY Prioritizing the needs and experiences of the customer in every decision and interaction	Value	How does the organization ensure it continues to provide value to its customers? For what do your customers pay the organization? How does your organization measure and track metrics that connect CX to business value? What value are the existing metrics unable to capture? How do the organization's competitors make money, and how is that different from how the organization makes money?	Organization is working hard to manage day-to-day business and is not observing market changes.	The organization is aware of market changes and innovation is a key part of the strategy, but without a specific roadmap and dedicated resources, innovation efforts are not being implemented.	Organization is focused on providing continued value to its customers by recognizing and responding to changing environments and competitive threats in the marketplace.
	Empathy (Research)	How well does the organization know its current customers? How well does the organization understand its potential customers? How do you ensure you can recognize an ideal experience for customers? How is research conducted? Is research done in-house or by 3rd party? How is research shared and institutionalized within the organization?	Research initiatives and investments are triggered reactively. Some products/service offerings are tested with actual customers through traditional channels such as focus groups and surveys. This type of testing is considered a check-box to be completed, and the feedback received is not consistently communicated or incorporated into the new offering. Research focuses on validating features, assumptions, and usability.	Select functions/employees within the organization are involved in contextual interviews, but feedback from these interviews is not shared with teams or incorporated in the design of new offerings.	Research is used proactively. Transformative insights come from research. Feedback from contextual interviews and other customer research methods is systematically collected, analyzed, and shared across relevant teams. This feedback is actively integrated into the design and development of new offerings, aligning products and services closely with customer needs. The organization promotes a culture of continuous improvement, emphasizing learning from customer interactions and challenging the status quo in development.
	Experience (Design)	How does the customer experience or interact with the organization? How does the organization ensure it's delivering the ideal customer experience? How do you ensure you can work toward the ideal experience? What are CX KPIs for leaders and others? Does the organization invest in design? What is the design language and branding guidelines? How does the design language and brand guidelines translate between different types of channels (e.g. physical, digital, spatial)?	Design is involved after the product strategy is set. Design is seen as making something pretty. There is no design language or design language is not applicable to where the company needs to grow. Brand definition is too high level and not specific or tactical enough to apply to design.	Design and technology partner in realizing product strategy. The organization recognizes the importance of a good experience, but hasn't yet prioritized implementing it.	Design is a means to differentiating in the market. Design sets product strategy. Brand guidelines and design language is mature and specific for a range of possible applications, can be easily transferred to physical product and digital.
	Mindset	How do you ensure the customer is at the forefront of innovations? Who are the customers and users? Who are prioritized and why? Should that change?	The organization mainly focuses on internal goals, without a consistent approach to include the customer experience.	The organization is increasingly, although inconsistently, prioritizing customer needs in decision-making.	The organization places the needs of customers at the forefront in all aspects of decision-making.
ORGANIZATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE Creating the foundation that supports the organization's innovation goals	Governance & Accountability	How are innovation decisions made? Who is accountable to ensuring innovation is a success? How is innovation funded? Who profits from the success? How involved is leadership?	Team members navigate a complex hierarchy to receive direction and approvals for innovation projects.	Organization is consensus-driven, leading to additional time spent on approvals. Slow decision-making makes it so it takes a long time for projects to move from conception to launch.	There are clear decision-makers and accountability structures in place. Decisions are made in reasonable timeframes, with strong rationale.
	Process	What is the innovation process? When and how do hand-offs occur? How and when is feasibility, viability, desirability, and operability assessed? How does your organization know how to make trade-offs throughout the process? What is negotiable and what isn't? How does your organization define constraints?	All innovation projects follow the same optimized process that is used for day-to-day work, with a strict, gated approach, documentation, and hierarchical decision-making. White space innovation projects are completed before constraints in implementation are considered, identified, and understood.	There is an innovation process, but there are struggles with hand-offs at different stages of an initiative.	There is an efficient process for quickly and effectively developing new innovation offerings, and the organization leverages these offerings to execute successfully on its strategy. The process is used as a good guide, but innovation teams know when to break it and use different methods or take different steps. There is room for iteration and exploration.
	Structure	What does collaboration look like? How siloed is innovation in the organization? Where do innovative ideas come from? How siloed is design, technology, and business? How do you staff innovation teams?	Innovation is a siloed department in the organization, not widely known or recognized. Multiple siloed groups are trying to solve the same problems without coordination. Innovation can only come from leadership.	Innovation happens within functions of the business, but there are few cross-disciplinary teams.	Innovation is not hierarchical. There is a mechanism for capturing innovation at every level of the organization. Innovation is coordinated and efforts are prioritized.
	Skills	Do you have skills mapped to needed roles? How often are skills maps updated? What does the organization's upskilling process look like? How does the organization continuously support skills development?	Members of project teams are selected based on their availability rather than skillset and expertise. Innovation teams are led by whoever happens to be the loudest and has the most opinions about what good innovation is. The organization has high turnover and/or stagnation within roles. There is no focus on upskilling, no Learning & Development, and no learning management system.	The organization insources ambitious movers and shakers to strengthen its internal capabilities and drive forward its innovation goals. Some teams in the organization view innovation as a part of their role.	The organization is matching output to skills the organization needs to have. The organization actively pursues and hire rockstars to lead innovation efforts. Everyone believes innovation and continuously learning is part of their role, with time given to learning. The organization is regularly updating and mapping skills needed for the future, and creating content to match the skills needed.
CULTURE Fostering cultural norms around change and innovation	Incentive	How is innovation rewarded? How are good ideas recognized?	Employees are focused on achieving short-term commercial success and personal targets, with rewards and promotions based almost exclusively on hitting those immediate goals. There is limited understanding and appreciation of the importance of experimentation and challenging traditional approaches within the organizational culture.	Employees know their contribution toward achieving the organization’s goals, but rewards/promotions are focused on commercial success.	Rewards/promotions are not based solely on market results, but also experimentation and challenging the status quo. Empowered leaders demonstrate bet your job courage, aligned with personal KPIs that reward business success.
	Socialization	How does the organization create alignment and buy-in for innovation? How is innovation communicated and socialized across the organization?	The organization doesn't recognize the importance of or provide the time for socialization for innovation. It's not considered or done.	Socialization occurs because of individual efforts, not a cultural norm. Innovation is socialized when it's looking for an internal buyer within the business.	Needs are gathered up front as a part of definition and prioritization, with business sponsors identified at the outset.
	Risk	What's the organizations comfort with risk? How well does the organization separate product risk and business risk? How does the organization measure the risk of doing something new? How does the organization assess the risk of not doing anything new?	Organization only sees innovation as a risk. The risk of public failure has created a culture of fear and risk aversion. The organization can only assess the cost of innovation.	The organization can assess potential revenue of innovation but courage is the bottleneck. The organization recognizes innovation and understands the potential risks, but lacks the courage to make it real.	The organization compares innovation options to future projection of status quo, including likely competitive dynamics and influence of new technologies.
	Adaptability	Does the organization have a culture that supports or resists change?	The organization resists change. There a preference for stability, consistency, and predictable outcomes. They tend to stick with established routines and may be slow to adopt new technologies or processes. Change is reactive, often initiated only in response to significant external pressures like financial downturns or serious competitive threats.	Some employees are actively looking to make change, while others in the organization are resistant to it. The organization often adopts a 'wait and see' approach, embracing change when there is clear evidence of potential benefits or when it is necessary to maintain competitive parity.	The organization is dynamic and flexible. Employees embrace new ideas and are quick to adapt to changing market conditions or technological advancements. The leadership often encourages experimentation and learning from failures, fostering an atmosphere of continuous improvement and agility. Employees are usually empowered with the tools and training necessary to embrace and drive change, making the organization nimble and proactive in its industry.
RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT Developing and capitalizing on emerging technologies	Invention (Development)	How much does the organization develop itself vs. outsource? How rigorous is the organization's documentation and testing processes? How judicious is the organization with what to build and when? How does your organization break down technical problems? How does the organization ensure clear technical requirements? How important is IP development in the organization?	Ideas become a napkin sketch, but never anything tangible. There are no requirements collected. Nothing is repeatable. The organization suffers from the PhD Problem of constantly re-inventing the wheel for simple, solved technical elements.	The organization has shiny object syndrome and values prototypes over results. There is a lack of testing, leading to unstable prototypes. Requirements are typically vague or written to match what has been built.	The organization has a prototype testing process. Limitations and risk are well understood. There are clear technical goals and requirements. It is clear what the prototype can and can't do as well as what it needs to do.
	Capability & Capacity (Production)	How does the organization identify external partners and internal capabilities? How does the organization establish and/or acquire new tools, equipment, and processes to produce new technologies? How well does the organization scale? How does the organization scale from 1 unit to 100 units, 100 units to 1 million units? When is manufacturing identified and part of the review process?	The organization has no process for scaling. There is no in-house expertise to carry design direction into manufacturing. The organization doesn't have any partnerships or internal capabilities and doesn't know how to find them.	The manufacturing partner is chosen based off of quotes and final design.	The organization has established partnerships and/or capabilities. The manufacturing partner (or internal capabilities) is identified early in the process. There is an established process from bringing on new partners.
	Regulatory & Compliance	Is the organization well versed in their regulatory environment? Does the organization have proper regulatory guidance on staff or in their network who can provide feedback throughout the innovation process? Does the organization have industry appropriate standard compliant quality management system in place? Are the relevant employees trained and capable of operating in that environment? How does the organization balance regulatory's no with innovation's yes mindset?	The organization hasn't considered how regulatory can impact the development process, including timeline, money, testing, etc.	The regulatory strategy constrains the development process.	The regulatory strategy informs, but does not artifically constrain the development process.
	Commitment	How does your organization determine the time and money investment required for research and development? How does your organization forecast for development? How does your organization ensure realistic time horizons?	The organization goes through exploration, but there's no established funding model for developing them. The default is negative: we won't act, because.... The organization is unwilling to do or uncomfortable with rework, iteration, and refinement.	A models exist for funding and moving development through the organization. The default is positive, and solution-oriented: we won't act unless.... However, the organization underestimates overall costs and limits iteration to promote speed to market.	The organization understands that anything new to the world requires investment. This includes the realities of timeline, rework, refinement, finding vendors, etc. The investment matches the ambition. The organization finds the right balance between speed to market and right for release.
DIGITAL AGILITY Advancing the digital maturity of the organization	Applications	How modern is the organization's applications? What's the ability to change applications? What's the ability to integrate new applications?	There are brittle systems, with no easy way to evolve them or intergrate into them. There is a lack of consistent standards and rules for maintaining applications built by a wide range of vendors. Different vendors manage different tiers, with more time spent on coordination rather than actual development and improvement of the product.	Independent teams, each technologically advanced, develop their own guidelines for specific applications, but there's no central governance to unify these efforts.	There is a clear technical strategy with defined technologies, enabling the organization to continually employ people with the right specific skills, identify which technologies best meet their business needs, and make informed choices among them. This stability prevents constant changes in technology use, allows for the enforcement of rules and standards, and helps understand the trade-offs and drawbacks of different technological options.
	Infrastructure, Cloud, & Automation	How easy it is to deploy new technology? How do you define and govern standards? How easy is it to adapt those standards to new technologies? What does it take to promote from staging to production? What's in place to monitor the infrastructure?	Everything is manual. Every deployment is an emergency. The organization is chasing cloud coupons resulting in multiple departments using multiple cloud providers.	Development, staging, and QA are automated, but production is still manual. There is no clear understanding of cloud spending.	Humans are not involved in infrastructure. Machines are deploying new code. Machines are monitoring the state of other machines. Humans are only involved in setting up the rules and boundaries. Infrastructure is cloud agnostic. The organization can anticipate cloud needs based on the future vision.
	Data & AI	How easy is it to create data? How easily accessible is data? How easily understandable is the data? How easy is it to consume the data? How trusted is the data? How effective are the organizations data hygiene practices?	The organization doesn't have the data because they can't make decisions. But they can't make decisions because they don't have the data. There is limited data talent in the organization.	Data is function-driven. Within a function in an organization, the team can produce and consume their own data. However, there is no consistency, access, or discoverability across functional boundaries. There are numerous tools for creating data models, but there are inconsistent opportunities to use the data and several disconnected data platforms.	Data is treated as an asset. It's findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. There is a proactive culture of using data to accelerate innovation and data is used for decision-making when relevant.
	Cybersecurity & Privacy	How is the organization integrating security into every stage of development and design? How is the organization performing continuous security testing against the innovation ?	Cybersecurity and privacy are not considered during the development process. The organization is in fire-fighting mode. Cybersecurity is ad-hoc and reactive. Process are not documented, with no standard architectures for new innovation to adopt.	Key processes are documented, but some are still ad-hoc. There is an initial set of baseline standards and architectures, with security work prioritized based on risk.	Well-defined standards and architectures are leveraged to deliver innovation as close as possible to secure. There is a process of constant testing and scanning post-release, feeding security vulnerabilities into the backlog.