Innovation Readiness Measurement
Only 20% of Companies Are Ready to Scale Innovation
Percentage of companies surveyed (%)
Innovation readiness (BCG i2i score)
Sources: BCG Most Innovative Companies Report 2021; BCG analysis.
Note: i2i = innovative to impact. Maximum readiness score is 100. Total number of companies surveyed = 1,000.
Before you can run, you need to learn how to walk. What is your readiness in accelerating innovation throughout your organization? To incorporate innovation into your DNA? It is a journey over several years where the needs will change depending on where you’re at in your journey.
Scoring is based on a 100-point scale that is designed to reflect best-practice maturity. BCG
consider organizations that earn a of score 80 or above to be ready to realize their innovation aspirations.
By that metric, only about 20% of companies are ready. Companies made progress on both dimensions in 2020, indicating that progress is possible even within a short time frame and under difficult circumstances. Still, large gaps are apparent between industries.
This matters because, as we reported last year, more innovation now takes place across industries, rather than just within a single sector, with numerous top-50 companies transcending traditional industry boundaries (see Amazon, Bosch, Target, and Sony).
A deeper dive reveals worrisome gaps in readiness even among committed innovators (those that invest significantly in their priorities), suggesting that many companies are likely to fail to realize their ambitions.
Innovation readiness (BCG i2i score) for commited innovators.
Sources: BCG Most Innovative Companies Report 2021; BCG analysis.
Note: i2i = sample of commited innovators only; n = 480; i2i = innovation to impact.
Although they score a bit better as a group than non-innovators, 74% of them are still not ready, according to our metrics. The largest gaps tend to involve what we call innovation practices—capabilities related to moving a portfolio of projects to impact. But we also see some significant gaps in innovation platforms, which set ambitions, define innovation domains, delimit roles, shape portfolios, and measure and reward performance.
These differences show up in performance, as demonstrate by the shareholder returns that members of BCG’s past 50 Most Innovative Companies rankings have generated. The members of our pre-pandemic top 50 from 2020 have outperformed the index by a staggering 17 percentage points in the past year; and even if you remove the high-flying tech giants (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix), top innovators’ still beat the index by 13 percentage.
points.
