Consider several inquiries, curated to reveal your innovation strengths and weaknesses

Are you consistently missing innovation and growth opportunities that your competitors act on?

Do your competitors consistently surprise you?

Is your level of innovation generation equal or better than your competitors?

Is your time to market (TTM) equal or better than your competitors?

Do you have awareness of how your competitors deal with the technical challenges that you are evaluating today?

Does your growth depend more on external or internal innovation?

Which is more important: cost savings or opportunity capture?

Are you using your R&D and IP-dedicated money effectively, and can you prove that objectively by any metric?

Are you aware of and tracking the ROI for your innovation costs?

Have you weeded out cost inefficiencies in your innovation capture?

Have you out-sourced inefficient internal innovation efforts?

Is your innovation spend based on opportunity and growth potential or on internal politics and the priorities high-revenue divisions?

Is your financial commitment to innovation on par with your competitors?

Are you focused on the right things?

Do you have false beliefs or biases in your decision making?

Are you preparing for the future or just the now?

Have you recalibrated for the new?

Are you a leader in the field because of what you have done in the past, or because of what you are working on next?

Have your innovation efforts become stagnant or bogged down with secondary issues?

Are your innovation efforts dominated by minor improvements to existing products?

Is your mindset passive, reactive, or proactive?

Do your competitors fear your next move?

Which is more important in ranking innovation projects: cost or performance?

Is there a back-up plan to extract value if an innovation plan fails?

Are your innovation efforts structured to be exportable to externals?

Can your innovation leaders collaborate effectively to produce valuable outcomes with externals, universities, other companies, and start-ups?

Do you treat diverse innovation projects the same when they have clearly different scopes and needs?

Do your innovation projects have to compete for funding with each other even when there is a clear winner in the group?

Do you continue to rely on advice, practices, or beliefs that have consistently failed to achieve your goals?