What’s next

We hope this assessment was helpful in assessing your executive team’s strength and gaps for innovation. We’ve spent over a decade working with innovation-focused companies to build high-performance teams from the C-Suite to the digital suite. Future-proofing your business and creating a sustainable competitive advantage relies on your leadership team’s ability to create a culture of constant experimentation and transformation fueled by both creativity and data.

Set up a time to chat with our experts to learn how your C-Suite and executive team can become change agents and innovation leaders for your company.

The data behind the questions

Question 1: Which of the following roles do you have in your executive team?

Chief Innovation Officer / Head of Innovation
Chief Digital Officer / Head of Digital
Chief Strategy Officer / Head of Strategy
Chief Data Officer / Head of Data
None of the above

Data: 82% of CEOs reported adding new C-level positions in the last five years, with the four roles listed above being the most common. These roles prioritize the innovation, digital focus, and strategy needed for the future. (Source)

Question 2: Which of the following would you say your executives and board have a strong competency in?

Digital transformation
Innovation
Artificial Intelligence
Data Science
None of the above

Data: Digital transformation, innovation, AI and Data science make up the five most important new capabilities needed from the C-Suite for the next 5-10 years. (Source)

Question 3: How much time do your leaders and board executives spend on strategy (as opposed to operations and talent management)?

~10%
15 - 25%
25 - 35%
35%+

Data: Leadership teams that transitioned to an agile approach quadrupled the time spent on strategy (from 10% to 40%) while saving time spent on other tasks such as reviewing the work of experienced operating managers (Source). An agile leadership team is one that embraces the principles of agile. They place more value on adapting to change than on sticking to a plan, and they hold themselves accountable for outcomes not outputs (Source ). Those who learn to lead agile’s extension into a broader range of business activities will accelerate profitable growth. (Source)

Question 4: How would you describe your leadership team’s approach to making decisions about innovation?

Approach based primarily on intuition or “gut feel”
Approach based primarily on internal data sources and standard analytics
Approach focuses on drawing insight from multiple internal and external data sources and uses advanced analytics

Data: In studies of innovation leader behavior, it was found that 73% percent of innovation leaders draw insights from multiple internal and external data sources and use advanced analytics to parse that data, compared with 43% of followers and only 11% of laggards. (Source)

Question 5: Which of the following would you say your executives are planning for and prioritizing as part of your organization’s strategy for the future?

Emerging technologies
Changing customer expectations and demands
Evolving business models
New market entrants
Changing employee expectations

Data: Executives ranked these top disruptions companies are facing (Source) while reporting that their rate of change is only increasing (Source).

Question 6: How would you describe your leadership team's openness to change?

They don't like change
They accept change as it becomes necessary
They embrace change when new trends and data emerge
They prioritize ongoing change through active research and innovation

Data: Resistance to change is ranked as the top barrier and challenge to managing disruption. Executive teams need to be change agents if they are to lead innovation and manage disruption. (Source)

Question 7: How confident are you in your leadership team and board executives’ ability to innovate and manage disruption?

Not very confident
Somewhat confident
Very confident

Data: 86% of executive respondents in a Harvard study say their company has been impacted by disruption, but only 24% have a strong confidence in their leadership's ability to manage disruption. (Source)