To continually improve, organisations need to not only examine their innovation performance, but also to evaluate their management processes with which they develop and commercialise these innovations. Traditionally, when organisations are measuring their innovation performance they concentrate on macro-level indicators of inputs and outputs. However, such metrics seem to more indicate than explain the organisation's performance.

To understand more deeply the innovation performance of an organisation organisations need to delve more into the processes that are used to ideate, develop, and commercialise these innovations and the institutional capability and leadership.

An innovation audit is a way to understand how an organisation is managing innovation, and recognise which parts of the pipeline are working and where more effort is needed. An innovation audit is a crucial step enabling organisations to objectively reflect and analyse their innovation activities taking an independent, third party view of what works well and what needs improvement prior to executing their innovation projects.

Our innovation audit framework is designed to consider all types of innovation, whether technological, market, human resource, financial, information, and organisational innovation.

The framework considers five core innovation processes:

• Ideation and concept development,
• Idea and concept selection,
• Product or service development,
• Product manufacture or service delivery, and
• Open innovation activities and IP management.

It also considers three enabling processes:

• Innovation strategy,
• People and culture, and
• Metrics.

Our innovation audit allows organisations to systematically review their innovation-related activities, discern clearly their strengths and areas in which improvements can be made, and to develop action plans for improvements which can be monitored for progress. Our innovation audit has two dimensions:

• the process audit identifies whether the processes necessary to nurture, support, develop, and commercialise innovations are in place and best practice is used;
• the performance audit supports organisations to identify gaps in their current performance enabling them to put action plans in place to close them.

As part of the innovation audit process, several employees take the survey anonymously enabling us to access diverse opinions from several departments and units of the client organisation and gain an in-depth understanding of what works well and identify areas that need improvement across all innovation management activities.

The goal at this point is to understand how innovation is currently operating and managed across the organisation and recognise any differences in the opinions and perceptions of senior executives and senior management within the business - allowing us to identify any gaps between how senior leadership describes their innovation strategic intent and how this is in reality working throughout the business on a daily basis. The above process is conducted as a combination of surveys and semi-structured interviews.

The weaknesses, challenges, and issues identified from the above process are then categorised across the above outlined five themes and specific actions are developed to address them enabling the organisation to improve their innovation management processes while the use of specific KPIs allows the monitoring and tracking of expected improvements.

Try out our innovation audit tool and reflect on your organisation's innovation management activities.