What are the Essential Ingredients for a successful Innovation Programme?

• Having a set of Values that nurture and enable Innovation
• Having the desire to use innovation to meet or exceed customer expectations, driven by a deep understanding of what they want
• Having the humility to readily collaborate with Key Stakeholders, both internal and external
• Having the ambition and willingness to identify and implement innovative new ways of working, including the appetite to take measured risks and the patience required to innovate successfully
• Having innovation processes embedded that support sustainability.
• Having clearly defined measures of innovation in place and setting aside both time and budget to innovate

What are the guiding principles and the structure of the EFQM innovation lens?

The EFQM Innovation Lens focuses on the activities, processes and a culture that combines to stimulate innovation and encourage it to flourish. It represents a broad view of innovation and aims to measure tangible business impact (Results) in relation to an an organisation’s declared Direction and the degree of success in Execution.

The EFQM Innovation Lens aims to improve innovative performance within any organisation, regardless of size, sector or maturity. Increasingly, organisations recognise that innovation is more than the development of new products, services or solutions. It is about creating a constant flow of new ideas, responding to new trends or changing market conditions, as well as improving the existing products, services and solutions.

Innovation is about engaging the whole organisation in the creative process, and this Innovation Lens is designed to:

• Help an organisation to understand what innovation means for it and challenge it to focus on developing new products, services, solutions and ways of working;
• Support any organisation in the development of processes to enable sustainable innovation;
• Provide a measure against which any organisation can measure its Innovation maturity over time

It is also aligned to the EFQM Model guiding principles helping any organisation consider how it supports the United Nations Global Compact (2000), the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals and how it addresses the Megatrends most likely to impact on its ecosystem.