There’s little doubt that there is a growing demand for big bets on innovation within corporate America today. In fact, the aptly named book that they wrote this year, “Big Bet Leadership,” John Rossman and Kevin McCaffrey, former Amazon, Google, and T-Mobile executives, outline how the companies that thrive in the years ahead will be those that master the art of big bets on transformative moves that dramatically expand the capabilities and potential of their businesses.

The business leaders responding to our recent survey certainly agree, with two-thirds (66%) noting that they’ve built their organization today to innovate at either a breakthrough (39%) or transformational level (27%). Innovating at a breakthrough level means that their organization is using innovation to drive meaningful change in the way they do business, or as a way to give customers something demonstrably new. Innovating at a transformational level is defined as introducing a transformative product or service that creates an entirely new industry/category.

Compare this with the 29% that say they are only innovating at an incremental level, which only makes upgrades to existing products or the (5%) that stated their organization does not innovate.

While transformational innovation thinking has lived for a long time in the technology market and Silicon Valley, there has been a significant shift in recent years as the approach is being adopted across nearly every industry. It’s always been true for technology companies that they need to look into the future and understand the direction the world is going to thrive in the years ahead.

As technology now plays a role in every industry, that means every company must focus on breakthrough or transformational innovations to ‘stay ahead’ in a rapidly evolving market dynamic. For instance, even when we look at respondents to our survey from the manufacturing sector, a historically slow industry to innovate, an even higher number say their manufacturing organization is best at innovating at a breakthrough (46%) or transformational level (31%).

3

of

8