Innovation Radar
The Innovation Radar maps twelve dimensions of innovation around four anchor points, what you offer, who you serve, how you do it, where you show up, so you can see which levers you're actually pulling and which you've ignored.
Twelve spokes fan out from the centre, grouped into four clusters marking what, who, how and where.
Reach for this when…
- 'Innovation' at your company always means a new product and nothing else.
- You want to check whether you're only innovating on one or two of many possible levers.
- Leadership keeps asking for more innovation but nobody can say where to look.
How to run it
- Score your business on each of the twelve dimensions: offerings, platform, solutions, customers, customer experience, value capture, processes, organisation, supply chain, presence, networking, brand.
- Plot the scores on the radar.
- Look for the dimensions sitting at zero, that's where you have not innovated at all.
- Pick two or three low-scoring dimensions that connect to your strategy.
- Set one small experiment against each chosen dimension.
A worked example
Situation. Amani Mushi managed Umeme Electronics, a consumer electronics retail chain in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, where every innovation meeting produced ideas about new products to stock and nothing else.
Applied. She scored the business on the twelve dimensions with her team; Offerings and Presence scored well, Value Capture and Networking both scored zero.
Result. The team piloted a subscription repair service, a new lever on Value Capture, and a partnership with a local recycler, a new lever on Networking, two areas they had never touched before.
The catch
Twelve dimensions is a lot to score honestly in one sitting, and teams often mark themselves generously on dimensions they don't understand well. It also treats all twelve as equally weighted, which they are not for every business, presence matters more to a retailer than to a software firm. Use it to find blind spots, not as a scorecard to optimise evenly.
A radar that scores well on all twelve dimensions at once usually means the scoring was too kind, not the innovation too broad.
Origin: Sawhney, Wolcott & Arroniz