Auditing the Innovation Capability of a leading South East Asia Telecom

How we drew the roadmap

As the goal behind assessing the client’s innovation capabilities was to help them improve, we agreed on three main deliverables that could help draw that path forward:

• Innovation Maturity Report and data – offering the company the ability to understand their current innovation capability level and what was holding them back, as well as benchmarking against industry peers.
• Prioritised capability blockers – a prioritised breakdown of current innovation blockers, the impact they have on the organisation’s innovation capability and what’s needed to remove or alleviate each one.
• Improvement Report – solutions and best practices on how to remove every innovation capability blocker identified in the assessment, aligned with the innovation maturity report.

Assessing their current innovation capability

We began the project by deploying our proprietary software, the Assessment for Innovation Maturity (AIM). AIM helps leaders tackle the challenge of driving growth through innovation by not only pinpointing the current state but defining the specific areas of focus for the strategic drive to increase innovation capability and culture.

Over a period of 6 weeks, over 1300 employees selected at random from across the organisation completed our assessment. Using AIM, we were able to hone in on the current innovation blockers these employees were facing day to day and the impact they were having on the organisation’s innovation strategy.

Breaking things down even further, we also used the assessment to look at the client’s innovation maturity in five pillar areas: Strategy, Leadership, Management, Culture and Process. This also applied to the report on their innovation blockers, as we used the data to identify which blocker corresponded to which pillar.

After presenting our report to the client’s senior leadership team, we then facilitated a workshop to go through the blockers that we had identified and prioritise them. This was done using a two-axis system by looking at the impact they had on the organisation and the effort it would take to remove them.

Finally, we delivered a custom private URL so that the client could always return to the data gathered with AIM and continuously review their progress as they worked on removing blockers.

Where they are now

Following the innovation maturity assessment, the client has reported being much more effective at driving innovation in the workplace and deploying improvement initiatives. Using the data from the Innovation Maturity Report and the best practices suggested in the Improvement Report, they have been able to save resources by knowing exactly where to intervene and how.

For example, they have since moved away from company-wide generic training programs and run more precise upskilling schemes to specific employee groups.

As a company with majority state ownership, they were also able to serve as a reference for other companies in which the national government was a major stakeholder. Based on the experience gathered by measuring their own innovation maturity, they are now helping other companies in their cluster to measure their own innovation maturity and understand how to tackle their respective blockers.