Evaluating an organisation's cultural readiness for innovation

Innovation is often identified as a major driver of organisational growth in free market economies. However, just as often, there is lack of understanding on how best to enable the desired innovation outcomes. This paper addresses assessment of the internal culture of a large commercial engineering company seeking to enhance its ability to build, promote and sustain competitive advantage within its market. The paper's objective is to describe a framework that was designed and tested within the enterprise. The framework identifies and tracks cultural prerequisites underpinning employees' creative activities and how these align with the organisation's readiness to enact innovative outcomes. The findings confirm that many of the prerequisites for developing and progressing new ideas are socially dependent. In addition, efforts to innovate can easily be dissipated and derailed unless the prevailing organisation culture actively encourages interaction of staff and provides tuned and visible practices to easily capture, assess, reward and action new ideas produced by that interaction.