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Assessing Enterprise Future Readiness

To assess potential to significantly improve business outcomes, how would you rate your organization on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being low and 10 being high) on the following ?

1. The organization is actively pursuing new initiatives and significant opportunities, encourages the leveraging of current competencies in new and different ways, has an appetite for meaningful change, is developing new skills / competencies / capabilities, people are willing to explore and go outside their comfort zones, etc.

2. There’s a strategy to

A. have more options to increase relevance and revenue
B. leverage core competencies for advantage
C. reimagine or become a new business
D. move to a new business model
E. Partner more to expand opportunities, reduce risk, improve agility, etc.

3. The organization has the ability, resolve, patience, risk tolerance, etc. to make good on new opportunities, an updated corporate vision, paradigm shifts, etc.

4. People are rewarded for their contribution to improving business outcomes by –

A. successfully creating appealing new options / products / services
B. successfully producing meaningful new products / services
C. successfully deploying meaningful new products / services
D. learning fast
E. recognizing failure is integral to deep learning
F. doing incremental, sustainable and disruptive innovation
G. impressive out-of-the box thinking
H. challenging the status quo
I. leveraging their business, technology and UX prowess for advantage
J. demonstrating entrepreneurial competencies
K. adding intelligence to processes
L. initiating and effecting change in the organization
M. increasing product / service share in current markets
N. growing current markets
O. successfully entering new markets
P. expanding revenue streams / value creation from innovation
Q. prudently managing the risks associated with innovation / change
R. relating well across the organization
S. demonstrating vision and leadership
T. meaningfully contributing and delivering on corporate strategic goals
U. meaningfully increasing organization relevance and revenue
V. being effective at engaging with people

5. The organization culture is open to new thinking, identifying and pursuing strategically important new initiatives, encouraging disruptive innovation to successfully drive meaningful change, etc. – in conjunction with internal and outside professionals very knowledgeable about business, technology and innovation

6. The organization is inclusive in developing an entrepreneurial and innovation culture

7. Important decisions are primarily based on “ External ” considerations

8. The organization encourages Innovation from “ process ” and “ inspiration ”

9. The organization has aggressive and new metrics for defining innovation and business success (ie: double / triple digit growth targets, presence in a new market, etc.)

10. The organization expects to be much bigger, more agile, and diversified in the future
ie: significant sales growth over the next 3, 5 and 10 years, growing current markets, major presence in new markets, having digital services a meaningful portion of revenue, being more sophisticated in decision making and managing risk, delivering new high margin products / services, etc.

Organization Future Readiness Assessment

While recognizing a certain subjectiveness with the questions and the ratings, an assessment guideline is as follows –

With a maximum total of 100 points, a score of –

75 or more indicates the organization is well positioned to move forward. However, given the rate of change (exponential time), potential industry paradigm shifts, the impact of new digital platforms and newer technologies, the need to deliver a great User experience, etc. – it’s advisable to build on what has been achieved to-date to better assure future readiness by further developing the entrepreneurial mindset and business innovation abilities, being a more agile and opportunistic organization, as well as updating risk management policies to be more oriented for a future business.

61 – 74 indicates the organization is making good progress on being future ready, but needs to accelerate progress and be more innovative to meaningfully move forward.

60 or less means time is of the essence to develop the requisite entrepreneurial, look ahead, innovation skills, etc. to be a thriving organization in the future.

To comment on this assessment or to discuss improving outcomes by being better at business innovation, please send a message to info@cail.com or call 905-940-9000.

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