Sharing and benchmarking innovation practices across industries, with peers, in real time, is a competitive advantage.

Organizations spend billions each year maintaining relevance with their customers, employees, investors, vendors, and constituents. Losing relevance can be a punishing experience and in some cases lead to organizational decay. Innovation leaders are often tasked with leading new initiatives. A new trend we’ve noticed is innovation teams who are responsible for standing up and leading new sustainability initiatives.

A large, well known, multi-national, technical apparel brand reflects this trend. Their innovation team is now responsible for standing up a new sustainability initiative driven by requests from their customers. Not only are they responsible for creating the structure and organization for sustainability efforts across the company, but they are also expected to continue leading product innovation and corporate innovation efforts.

It’s becoming more common for organization to merge innovation with other functional areas such as sustainability.

According to our research approximately 30% of the Fortune 500/Global 2000 have proper innovation functions. We qualify this with a requirement that each of these organizations, at minimum, is making a meaningful and material investment into innovation efforts.

Double clicking into the 30% we also identify less than 10% that are reliably, repeatedly, and dependably producing new innovations. This represents a threat and a tremendous opportunity. Benchmarking with peers to ensure your innovation function is properly functions can be tremendously impactful.

Where does your corporate innovation and growth efforts stand at the dawn of 2023?