Innovation management professionals have one of the most challenging roles within any organization. They’re responsible for helping companies adapt to change, stay current, and protect themselves against disruption. They’re entrusted with ensuring the business doesn’t die while simultaneously optimizing current operations for maximum efficiency.
But Innovation work rarely comes with a clear blueprint. Innovation management professionals need better tools to navigate the complexity and challenges that prevent them from achieving their vision for their organization.
So, we’ve made it our mission to uncover the challenges faced by innovation professionals and bring them to the forefront. Our goal is to strengthen the field of innovation management and help innovation professionals make a greater impact in their organizations.
To do this, we are launching the Innovation Management Job Map: a focused, 15-minute survey designed to foster a more precise, shared understanding of the challenges innovation management professionals face.
But it isn’t a generic survey. Think of it more as a tool for reflection and planning. It will provide instant insights relevant to your job.
It’s grounded in the Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) methodology and was developed in collaboration with Jim Kalbach, author of the JTBD Toolkit, and Yann Wüthrich, a pioneer in JTBD at Vendbridge.
This means that it is focused on the real tasks, goals, and struggles of innovation management professionals.
Complete the 15-minute survey here.
Get your Innovation Management Job Matrix Instantly
You will get immediate results after you finish the survey. It will help you decide where to double down, shore up, or monitor your efforts.
Get a personalized list of opportunities for improving innovation at your company
You will also receive a list of key priorities for improving innovation, highlighting the areas where your innovation management function is underserved, based on your feedback.
Complete the 15-minute survey here.
Another 3 Benefits of Completing This Survey
After you complete the job map survey, you can subscribe to get access to the aggregated data and actionable takeaways gathered from the entire pool of respondents, which will benefit you in three key areas:
You can benchmark your organization against others in your industry.
You can uncover the drivers of your challenges.
You can potentially improve your daily work for the better.
1. You Can Benchmark Your Organization Against Others in Your Industry
The aggregated data should give you a deep understanding of what other innovation managers in your industry are focused on and where they spend their time (e.g., engaging employees in ideation, getting leadership buy-in, testing moonshot ideas).
It should also provide clarity on their priorities:
Are they prioritizing disruptive ideas or continuous improvement ideas?
How focused are they on AI innovation? And what are they doing to spark AI adoption among employees?
From there, you can benchmark your organization’s innovation maturity against others in your industry. If you’re behind, for example, you could use the survey results to persuade top management to ramp up investment in those areas.
The survey results can also validate your priorities and help justify resource requests internally. You can see what other innovation managers and organizations are working on, and whether that aligns with your strategic direction or you’re the odd ones out.
2. You Can Uncover the Drivers of Your Challenges
When you receive the aggregated results, you’ll be able to see the core struggles other innovation professionals face. Those struggles are linked to organizational contexts, such as team size, industry, innovation setup, and top management support, among other things.
You can then identify common connections between struggles and specific organizational contexts, and potentially reach conclusions about the drivers behind your struggles. For example:
Does industry play a part in securing leadership buy-in? Are some industries more hesitant to invest in innovation than others?
Does team size correlate with or influence which struggles appear most often?
Do specific reporting structures create particular bottlenecks?
Does the mandate of the innovation unit correlate with specific difficulties?
3. Consider This a 15-minute Introspective Exercise
Through this survey, you’ll be prompted to articulate your role, frustrations, and priorities. We believe that this self-reflection alone can provide the clarity to help reshape how you approach your profession now and in the future.
Take the 15-Minute Innovation Job Map Survey
Complete the 15-minute survey, get immediate results, and we’ll send you aggregated data and key takeaways so you can learn from others in your industry.
