Alexandria, VA (December 10, 2017) – According to a 2016 survey by McKinsey & Company, 84% of Corporate Executives felt that Innovation was an important aspect of their company’s growth strategy. That means that, if you are reading this and you are an executive, the odds are strong that you believe in the importance in Innovation.
But that survey was not about whether companies feel the need to be innovative. That would be like testing whether water was wet. Whether there needs to be a law prohibiting Christmas music from being played on the radio before December. Or whether Bryce Harper will sign a $300+ million contract next offseason. For those playing along at home, the answers are: it is, there needs to be, and he will. But what was interesting about the survey was that of that 84%, only 6% of those executives were satisfied with their innovation performance.
And that is an interesting statistic in the current business environment where PwC is reporting that worldwide R&D spending was up 3.2% in 2017 and Amazon just reported that it spent $16 BILLION dollars on R&D (capitalization for emphasis).
So why are companies not happy with their Innovation efforts? Well, it turns out there are a few simple reasons:
Reason 1: Innovation is just hard. Innovation is fundamentally doing something different than what your normal process dictates, and the unknown can be frightening.
Reason 2: Companies have limited resources, and it can be very challenging to determine how best to utilize them in an innovation capacity. How do you compare investing in a technology that will save your accounting staff X% of hours against introducing a new product to market?
Reason 3: There is a risk of the company throwing money at ideas that might not work out. And while this will always be a risk, through our tools, framework, and knowledge, we can show you how to mitigate some of those risks.
Today, Ever Evolving is announcing the release of our new product line designed to help our partner clients innovate more effectively. Our InnoSpecting Framework™, combined with our InnoSpecting Framework Management© tool suite, is designed to help our partner organizations address the three issues noted above and help our partners get more Return on Investment from their Innovation Portfolio.
We coined the term InnoSpecting™ because we developed this novel approach from the ground up. InnoSpecting™ is a combination of Innovation (obviously), Prospecting (or looking externally for value) and being Introspective (or looking internally for how and where you can improve). Our framework is built around the Capture-REFINE-Retire™process, where we help our clients take in new ideas from sources both internal and external to the organization, methodically choose which ones to invest, refine those investments from concept to creation, and finally retire any products and processes BEFORE they become a financial and intellectual drain to your organization. Our process was designed specifically to simplify innovation.
To implement our Framework, our team built the InnoSpecting Framework Management© tool. The Excel-based tool is designed to help our partner clients identify how best to use their limited resources and limit their exposure of throwing good money towards bad innovations. Our tool incorporates a gated workflow that provides corporate executives with a common set of evaluation criterion, providing our partners with a way to perform like-comparisons across all innovations within their pipeline at every stage of the process. And it has the added benefit of providing our partners with Ever Evolving’s custom Intellectual Property for ranking innovations, helping executives separate ideas that have true potential from those that do not.
We provide our framework, tools, and coaching services in a variety of Packages designed to fit the needs of our partners. All of our coaching packages include a one-week Introductory session designed to introduce the concepts of the InnoSpecting Framework™ and help organize our partners for success. It also comes with our commitment that all our partners who invest in our InnoSpecting Framework™ will have their innovation pipelines established within 90 days of kickoff.
As an additional bonus gift for signing up with us, we are providing an organizational-wide innovation assessment for any member of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. Through this gift, valued at over $12,000, we are able to provide our partner clients with a 3rd-party assessment on their innovation-readiness levels, and provide a set of recommendations from our experts on how to address any identified areas of weakness.
If you are still unsure about whether this program is right for you. You may also want to take our 5-minute questionnaire designed to test how innovatively-focused your organization is. The questionnaire can be found at https://everevolving.biz/innovation_quiz. You may also schedule an appointment to talk directly with one of our experts at https://everevolving.biz/appointment.
About Ever Evolving, Inc.
Ever Evolving, Inc. is an Alexandria, VA-based business dedicated to helping the world and all its inhabitants evolve into their best self. Our belief is that while today may be great, tomorrow can always be better. We provide Innovation Coaching to businesses and focus on leaving behind a process and a set of tools that allows our partner clients to continue with our efforts long after we have departed. While we believe that any business would receive value from our framework and tool suite, our typical partner clients has been in business for 10 years or more and have monthly revenues greater than $1 million. For more information on our product and service offerings, visit our website at https://everevolving.biz or email us at info@everevolving.biz
About the Author
Steve Palmer is an innovator with over 12 years of experience in driving businesses forward through innovative initiatives. As one of the founders of Ever Evolving, Mr. Palmer was pivotal in the design of the InnoSpecting Framework™ and the InnoSpecting Management Tool™. The best way to contact Mr. Palmer directly with any questions is through email at steve@everevolving.biz.
