Grow your impact with the Innovation Growth Diagnostic - a free strategic tool
The Innovation Growth Diagnostic will help your programme take off in 2021 ( photo credit )
2020 was incredibly hard for everyone
There is no doubt 2020 was a hugely challenging year. It was challenging for everyone in all parts of society across the globe. The challenge continues in 2021 with strict lockdowns in place in the UK and working parents facing homeschooling their children while working throughout the day and evening.
And it was a hugely challenging year for charity fundraisers. Many were furloughed, and organisations experienced a significant decline in fundraised income. Dialogue fundraising, retail operations, mass participation events, high-value events and community fundraising are suffering, severely impacting operations and income generation. Analysis in June by independent charity Pro Bono Economics predicted a £6.4bn loss of income over the six months to December 2020 for the UK’s 170,000 charities, leaving one in 10 potentially facing bankruptcy.
Income at 15 charities is down significantly
“‘There is an increased focus on innovation. Participants spoke of a significantly greater level of organisational support for innovation. But also that a truly strategic approach to innovation has not yet been implemented or proven.’”
Creating a successful innovation strategy
So with an increased focus on charity innovation within the sector, we at Flying Cars developed a free strategic tool to help organisations assess and improve their innovation portfolio. Thus the Innovation Growth Diagnostic was born. As an innovation agency working with charity partners, we want your campaigns to succeed. The Innovation Growth Diagnostic will help you do just that.
The tool will identify areas within your culture, infrastructure and processes that can be improved to increase your impact and success. Thus the Innovation Growth Diagnostic was born.
Innovation is often cited by business leaders like Mckinsey, Harvard Business Review and others as a critical component of growth. It is, however, hard to create the right conditions for innovation to flourish. Inspiring words, lofty aspirations and sprinkling the word innovation across your key business documents will not bring results.
Like any core business area, it is essential to put in place a sustained programme of investment of time and resource linking innovation to your critical business deliverables.
“Inspiring words, lofty aspirations and sprinkling the word innovation across your key business documents will not bring results.”
How does the Innovation Growth Diagnostic work?
With decades of experience creating, running and fixing innovation programmes Flying Cars has developed a series of penetrating questions that will show where to focus time to incrementally and exponentially improve your innovation programme. The diagnostic concentrates on six key areas:
Leadership and strategy - effective and supportive leadership is a crucial component of running a high performing innovation team. This section will help you understand if you have enough support from your CEO and executive team, and if your innovation strategy is well linked to the organisational strategy.
Expertise & capacity - Having the right resources and skills to support your innovation projects is crucial for running successful innovation programmes of work. Do you know how to prototype your ideas and test in a lean way?
Audience-led design - Having your beneficiaries and supporters at the heart of decisions, and driving decisions via audience-derived evidence is key to co-creating innovations that people want and need. Once you’ve completed this section, you will have a clearer idea of how well resourced your innovation infrastructure is to create qualitative and quantitative insight and where you may need to improve your audience’s diversity to reach new highs.
Risk - building an environment that manages the inherent risk of testing new ideas will give senior managers the confidence to invest in your programme. The diagnostic will uncover potential flaws in your process that may lead to creating in-depth fantasy income and expenditure models for ideas that don’t even exist yet. It will also help you understand if your team is being used as a place for projects that have no obvious home. A strong strategy will help make this a thing of the past.
Communication - Effective communication is essential in building an innovation portfolio that delivers for your organisation. We know many organisations have a considerable problem talking about failure and making it a prized part of the innovation process, is at best aspirational. Inconsistent evaluations and not distributing insight that could be shared and highly valued around the rest of your organisation will reduce your impact.
Ways of working/process - Having effective processes in place are one of the key pillars for any innovation team. When you are running innovation cycles, you will be reliant on many teams for successful delivery. A robust process is a must - with clear understanding around roadblocks, responsibilities and what is needed at each crucial stage.
As you complete the diagnostic, you will rate each question on a scale of 1-4, and each area receives a score at the end of the process.
After completion, you may have identified gaps in your capabilities and processes and prioritised areas for improvement in each section. Additionally, a Flying Cars consultant may be able to produce a bespoke report (dependent on available resources at the time) with actionable insights and suggested priority projects just for you for the next quarter.
We are also building up anonymised benchmarked data, allowing you to compare yourself to other charities that have completed the process. Your report will include your benchmarked position across each of the six categories.