Innovation Maturity - Six Dimensions of Organisational Readiness
- Susie Braam
- 11 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Before you hire anyone, take an honest look at whether you've built the foundations for them to succeed.
The Question Most Organisations Skip
In my previous article, I explored why innovation teams fail. The short version: they're often set up without clarity about what job they're hired to do, without adequate resources or executive protection, and without connection to the core business.
But there's an even earlier question most organisations skip entirely: Are we actually ready for an innovation team?
It's a bit like our restaurant metaphor. Before you hire your chef and wait staff, you need to check some basics. Do you know who your target customers are and what they want? Do you have a chef with the skills to create the food you want to serve? Do you have an investor with enough money to keep the lights on while you build your customer base?
You wouldn't open a restaurant without these foundations. Yet organisations launch innovation teams all the time without checking whether the conditions for success actually exist.
Here's what I've learned from working with organisations across sectors - from social housing associations to large multi-national firms to national security agencies: organisational readiness isn't about being perfect. It's about being honest about where you are, so you can design (and adapt) an innovation approach that actually fits your context.
The Six Dimensions of Innovation Readiness
Through my work helping organisations build innovation capability, I've identified six foundational dimensions that predict whether an innovation team will thrive or struggle. Think of these as the load-bearing walls of your innovation house - weaknesses in any one area can bring the whole structure down.
1. Leadership Commitment & Sponsorship
This goes beyond senior leaders saying innovation is important. It's about whether they're willing to act on that commitment - allocating real resources, removing obstacles, and protecting innovation efforts when they conflict with short-term priorities.
The honest questions: Does your executive team understand what innovation actually requires? Do you have a senior sponsor who will actively champion innovation work - not just lend their name to a steering committee? When innovation efforts hit resistance, will leadership step in or step back?
I've seen innovation teams with brilliant people fail simply because no one with real power was fighting their corner. In one government department, when budget cuts came, they were first on the list. When they needed access to decision-makers, they couldn't get meetings. Without genuine leadership commitment, everything else becomes harder.
If you're weak here: Identify one or two senior leaders who are both influential and open to innovation. Can you recruit them as advocates? Work with them to build early test cases that demonstrate value. Sometimes bringing in credible outside speakers or facilitators can help leadership sit up and take notice - external voices often carry weight that internal champions can't (however annoying that might be!).
2. Strategic Clarity & Purpose
Innovation without strategic direction is just expensive experimentation. Your organisation needs clarity about where innovation fits - what problems it should solve, what opportunities it should pursue, and how it connects to broader business objectives.
The honest questions: Can your leadership team articulate why innovation matters right now? Is there agreement on what kind of innovation you need - incremental improvements, new products, new business models, cultural transformation? Do people across the organisation understand how innovation connects to the strategy?
One social housing client I worked with initially wanted an innovation team to "make us more innovative." When we dug deeper, we uncovered specific challenges: rebuilding customer trust after service failures, finding new approaches to tenant engagement, and preparing for regulatory changes. That clarity completely changed how we designed their innovation approach.
If you're weak here: Don't try to boil the ocean. Run a focused session with key stakeholders to identify one or two specific problems innovation should solve or opportunities it should pursue. Starting with a single well-defined challenge is far more effective than a broad mandate to "be more innovative."
3. Resources & Investment
Innovation requires investment - not just money, but time, attention, and talent. Teams need budget to run experiments, access to people with the right skills, and protected time away from business-as-usual demands.
The honest questions: Is there dedicated budget for innovation, or will teams need to beg for resources project by project? Can you attract or develop people with innovation skills? Will innovation work be treated as "real work" or something people do on top of their day jobs?
The resource question is often where stated commitment meets reality. I remember a conversation with Tom, a newly appointed Head of Innovation at a large accountancy firm - he’d been appointed to this post alongside his day job and without any budget or people! Organisations say they want innovation but expect it to happen without additional investment. That's like opening a restaurant and expecting your staff to bring their own ingredients.
If you're weak here: Start with low-resource experiments that prove value before asking for more. Look for existing budgets that could be redirected - perhaps from initiatives that aren't delivering or projects that have stalled. A small win funded creatively often unlocks larger investment later.
4. Organisational Culture
This is where many innovation efforts quietly die. Culture determines whether people feel safe proposing bold ideas, whether failure is treated as learning or career-limiting, and whether collaboration happens naturally or requires heroic effort.
The honest questions: Do people genuinely feel safe challenging existing processes? When experiments fail, what actually happens to the people involved? Does cross-functional collaboration happen easily, or does it require extensive negotiation and escalation? Are calculated risks encouraged and rewarded - or just tolerated?
Culture is hard to change and easy to overestimate. Most organisations believe their culture is more innovation-friendly than it actually is. The gap between what leaders say and what employees experience can be substantial.
If you're weak here: Start small with a "safe to fail" pilot in a team that's already supportive. When things don't work, publicly celebrate what you learned - make it visible that failure led to insight and next steps, not punishment. Run retrospectives that normalise discussing what didn't work. Culture shifts through accumulated experiences, not announcements.
5. Customer Orientation
Innovation that isn't grounded in real customer needs is just internal entertainment. Your organisation needs genuine connection to customers - not just satisfaction surveys, but deep understanding of their problems, behaviours, and unarticulated needs.
The honest questions: Do you regularly engage directly with customers to understand their evolving needs? Do customer insights actually influence decision-making? Can teams access customers to test and validate ideas quickly?
In one government agency, I saw a developer on an innovation team spend several weeks building an impressive, but ultimately unused, solution. I had urged him to speak to end-users, to better understand the workarounds they were using and how those did, or didn’t work for them. But unfortunately, this developer was more interested in the technology and building something than in customer needs.
Customer orientation isn't about being "customer-focused" in your mission statement. It's about having the habits, access, and willingness to let customer reality shape your innovation agenda.
If you're weak here: Schedule regular direct customer conversations - not surveys, actual conversations. Partner with frontline colleagues who interact with customers daily; they often have insights that never reach decision-makers and are desperate to tell someone! Build customer testing into your earliest experiments, before you've invested heavily in any particular solution.
6. Operational Readiness
Even successful innovations can die at the point of integration. Operational readiness is about whether your organisation can actually absorb and scale innovations - whether processes exist to evaluate ideas, make decisions, and integrate successful experiments into the core business.
The honest questions: Do you have clear processes for evaluating and prioritising innovation opportunities? Can decisions be made quickly enough to maintain momentum? When an innovation succeeds, can it actually be integrated into operations? Do legal, compliance, and IT teams support innovation or reflexively block it?
This dimension often gets overlooked in the excitement of launching innovation initiatives. But if successful innovations can't be absorbed into the business, you're just generating interesting ideas that never create value.
If you're weak here: Involve operational, legal, and compliance teams early in innovation projects - not at the end when they can only say no. Create a simple stage-gate process so everyone knows how ideas get evaluated and decisions get made. Even a basic framework prevents good ideas from dying in ambiguity.
Meeting Your Organisation Where It Is
Here's the thing: very few organisations score highly across all six dimensions. That's not a reason to abandon innovation - it's a reason to be realistic about your starting point.
Low readiness doesn't mean "don't do innovation." It means start smaller. Build foundations. Perhaps begin with a single pilot project rather than a dedicated team. Focus on quick wins that demonstrate value and build credibility. Work on culture and leadership buy-in before scaling up.
Moderate readiness means you can move forward, but strategically. Address your gaps deliberately. If leadership commitment is strong but culture is weak, focus early efforts on creating psychological safety and celebrating learning from failure. If you have resources but lack strategic clarity, invest time in defining the job your innovation efforts are hired to do.
High readiness means you have the foundations for ambitious innovation. But don't get complacent - readiness can erode quickly when leadership changes (something I personally experienced in my career), budgets tighten, or organisational priorities shift.
The goal isn't to wait until everything is perfect. It's to design your innovation approach to match your actual context, not the context you wish you had.
If you're serious about building innovation capability, start with an honest assessment of where you stand. I've created a free self-assessment that takes about 6 minutes and covers all six dimensions. It won't give you all the answers, but it will show you where your foundations are solid and where they need work.
Once you've completed it, here's how to use your results:
Note your overall score - this gives you a general sense of readiness, but the real value is in the dimension-by-dimension breakdown.
Identify your weakest dimensions - these are your priority areas. An innovation team can't compensate for fundamental gaps in leadership commitment or cultural safety.
Have honest conversations - share your assessment with colleagues and see if they agree. Differences in perception often reveal important tensions.
Design for your reality - let your readiness profile shape your innovation approach. Don't copy what worked for organisations with different starting conditions.
The organisations that succeed with innovation aren't the ones with perfect readiness scores. They're the ones honest enough to understand their starting point and smart enough to design an approach that fits.
This is Article 2 in a series on building innovation teams that actually work. Article 1 covered why innovation teams fail and what makes them succeed. Next, I'll explore the different models for innovation teams and how to choose the right one for your context. Subscribe at www.susiebraam.com for early access.
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