Innovation and Digital Transformation Briefs

For innovation leaders, mandates for metrics from CEOs and CFOs are nothing new, but how do you measure the competencies that help companies become better innovators, such as creating an innovation culture, or being better prepared to work on diverse teams?

Culture of innovation is a powerful driving force for corporations. The bigger picture, however, is that when the culture of innovation is measured consistently with other descriptive attributes, the results can reliably predict the cash flow multiple. The clear implications are that managers who need to justify and provide accountability for their budgets have a new tool to measure, value, and manage return on investment for intangible assets.

Goodwill on the balance sheet isn’t good enough. Until a better, more transparent accounting, or fair value method replaces goodwill, intangible assets will remain impossible to manage and unaccountable to shareholders. Not providing transparency will have consequences such as significant write-downs ($15 billion write-down for the acquisition of Kraft) of brands and restatements of financial reports.

This year’s C-Suite Challenge painted a clear picture of how corporations’ most senior executives see the future, and what priorities and interventions are required to succeed in it. We have been looking at the insights through an Innovation & Productivity lens to help Innovation leaders best influence the priorities and efforts ahead.

"Save the web: technology should serve humanity, not undermine its core values and institutions" is just one of John Metselaar's takeaways from this year's Lisbon Web Summit. As more than half the world's population becomes digitally connected, industry, governments, citizens and academia need to work together to keep the "digital peace."

Artificial intelligence (AI) could help to address significant societal challenges, including those identified in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For organizations that seek to use such technology for social good, an understanding of the existing use cases and potential for social impact should be considered within the context of a heightened regulatory framework that might stifle successes.

Despite not understanding how Silicon Valley works, hundreds of corporations have started Silicon Valley innovation labs because they know that digitization is rapidly changing everything, and their corporate cultures are too siloed, insular, slow to accept, slow to use, and slow to commercialize the innovation they desperately need to survive.

An organization’s culture of innovation can be a robust predictor of financial performance, which highlights the importance to companies of measuring intangible assets. With intangible assets growing exponentially as a component of enterprise value, it is unproductive to allow them to go unmanaged.