As part of its mission to deliver collaborative economic development programs and initiatives, Invest Ottawa has announced the launch of an innovation management clinic to help businesses maximize innovation processes.
Last year, a report from Ernst and Young discovered that 93 percent of executives admit that innovation is either important or very important to their growth — but 70 percent don’t separate their innovation strategy from their larger business strategy.
For this reason, the Innovation Clinic may help businesses make sense of their innovation strategies. The program involves a questionnaire to determine the status of innovation in a company and its competitive position in targeted markets. The platform will then interpret the data and provide a dashboard plotting of results for the competitive corporate diagnostic; companies then have the option to get a guided interpretation and recommendations with Dr. Sorin Cohn, president of BD Cohnsulting and leader of Innovation Metrics in the Centre for Business Innovation of the Conference Board of Canada. While the first service is free, the interpretation and dashboard plotting require an administration fee.
Dr. Cohn is responsible for developing the competitive innovation management diagnostic (CIMD) in the clinic.
“As our recent surveys showed, the real challenge for CEOs today is how to manage innovation effectively,” said Bruce Lazenby, CEO and President of Invest Ottawa. “The Innovation Clinic will provide CEOs a customized tool (a dashboard) showing the company’s competitive position, an assessment of their innovation investments, management practices, and the alignment of their culture with business goals and strategies.”
Invest Ottawa said that the Clinic will help capture executive team misalignment, assist with aligning company culture to business goals, understand the types of partnerships required for market success, and a roadmap for improving competitive performance.