How to assess your organisation's innovation maturity

An innovation maturity assessment tells you how reliably your organisation turns ideas into value, and which one or two weaknesses are holding that back. Do it well and you get a short list of moves that leadership will fund. Do it badly and you get a radar chart, a score out of five, and no change. The difference is almost never the model you choose; it is whether you collect evidence instead of opinions, and whether the assessment ends in decisions.

This guide maps the whole topic: what maturity actually means, the frameworks worth borrowing from, a step-by-step way to run an assessment, the mistakes that make results useless, and where to go next.

What "innovation maturity" means, and what it doesn't

Maturity is not how many ideas you have, how modern your office looks or whether you have an innovation team. It is how repeatable your path from insight to working initiative has become. A mature organisation can do three things on purpose, not by luck:

• Find the right problems. It knows where it needs to innovate, because innovation is tied to strategy and to what customers or citizens are struggling with.
• Move ideas through a known path. There is a way to test, fund, pause or stop work, and people know it.
• Learn and keep the value. Results are measured, lessons are kept, and successful pilots become part of normal operations.

An immature organisation can still produce brilliant one-off successes. The tell is that nobody can explain how it happened or do it again.

It also helps to separate maturity from performance. Performance is what came out last year. Maturity is the system that makes next year's results likely. You need both views; this hub's article on how to measure innovation covers the performance side.

The frameworks you can lean on

You do not need to invent a model. Several reference points already exist, and you can borrow from them while keeping your assessment light.

ISO 56001:2024. Published by ISO in September 2024 and developed by ISO's technical committee on innovation management (ISO/TC 279), this is the first standard in the ISO 56000 family that sets requirements for an innovation management system, which means an organisation can be certified against it by an independent body. It follows the same high-level structure as other ISO management system standards, from context and leadership through planning, support, operation, performance evaluation and improvement, and it is written to apply to any organisation, whatever its type or size. If your leadership talks about certification, read ISO 56001 explained for practitioners.

ISO 56002:2019 and ISO/TR 56004:2019. ISO 56002 is guidance on an innovation management system, not something you are certified against. ISO/TR 56004 is a technical report giving guidance specifically on innovation management assessment. Together they are useful when you want a recognised vocabulary for your dimensions without committing to certification. The difference between the requirements standard and the guidance is covered in ISO 56001 vs ISO 56002.

Sector and national measurements. Some organisations are already assessed from outside. Saudi government entities, for example, take part in the Digital Government Authority's digital transformation measurement (known as Qiyas), whose highest stage is about entities offering creative and innovative models in their digital work. If an external measurement already applies to you, align your internal assessment with it rather than running two unrelated exercises. The Saudi edition of this hub covers preparing for Qiyas.

Sources checked for this section: ISO's catalogue entry for ISO 56001:2024 and the published list of ISO/TC 279 documents (iso.org); RISE (Sweden) and UNE (Spain) announcements of the standard's release; Saudipedia's entry on the Digital Transformation Index.

A word of caution: none of these frameworks prescribes a single maturity scale you must use. Any five-level ladder you see online is someone's interpretation. That is fine, but treat it as a conversation tool, not a measurement instrument.

The dimensions worth assessing

Whatever framework you borrow from, most useful assessments look at the same handful of areas. Keep it to six to eight, phrased in your own organisation's language.

1. Direction. Is there a stated reason to innovate, linked to strategy? Do people know which problems matter most?
2. Leadership behaviour. Do senior people sponsor work, make funding decisions on time and protect teams when experiments fail?
3. Culture and safety. Can people raise problems and half-formed ideas without cost? Is stopping a project seen as competence or as failure?
4. Process. Is there a known path from idea to pilot to scale, with clear decision points?
5. People and capability. Who has practised the methods, not just attended training? Is contribution recognised?
6. Portfolio and resources. Is there a deliberate mix of small improvements and bigger bets, with money and time set aside?
7. Measurement and learning. Are results tracked beyond "number of ideas"? Are lessons kept and reused?
8. Partners and ecosystem. Does the organisation work with startups, universities, suppliers or other entities on shared problems?

Notice that each dimension is about behaviour and evidence, not about whether a document exists. A strategy PDF nobody has read is not direction.

How to run an assessment, step by step

1. Decide what the result is for

Write one sentence before anything else: "This assessment will help us decide…". Typical answers are where to invest next year, whether to pursue certification, or how to prepare for an external measurement. If you cannot finish the sentence, stop. An assessment with no decision attached produces a report that sits in a folder.

2. Set the scope

Assess a unit that actually shares a way of working: one directorate, one business line, one entity. Assessing a whole group of companies at once averages away every useful difference.

3. Choose your dimensions and define "good" for each

For each dimension, write three short descriptions in plain words: what it looks like when it is weak, developing and strong in your organisation. This is the most important hour of the whole exercise. Vague descriptors ("innovation is embedded") produce vague answers.

4. Gather evidence, not opinions

Surveys alone measure mood. Combine three sources:

• Interviews with 10 to 20 people across levels, including people who have tried to push an idea and given up. Use stakeholder interviews and ask for stories, not ratings: "Tell me about the last idea you saw get funded."
• Artefacts: decision records, pilot reports, budgets, portfolio lists. What exists, and is it used?
• Trace one or two real initiatives from first idea to today. Where did they stall, who decided, how long did each step take?

5. Rate together, in a calibration session

Bring the evidence to a two-hour session with a small, mixed group. For each dimension, place the organisation on your weak/developing/strong descriptions and record why, with the evidence. Disagreement is useful; it usually reveals that different parts of the organisation work very differently.

6. Pick three moves, not thirty

The output that matters is not the profile; it is the next three changes. Choose them by asking which weakness most limits everything else. Often it is a decision problem (no one can fund a pilot in under six months) rather than an ideas problem. Use portfolio mapping or three horizons to check that the moves cover both today's improvements and longer-term bets.

7. Reassess on a rhythm

Repeat the assessment roughly every year, using the same descriptors, and run a retrospective on the three moves at the midpoint. Movement over time is far more telling than a single snapshot.

An example

Illustrative. A regional logistics company with about 1,200 staff in three countries asked for an innovation maturity assessment after its board questioned why a well-funded ideas campaign had produced nothing that launched. The innovation manager scoped it to the operations division, wrote descriptors for seven dimensions and ran 14 interviews, including two with drivers' supervisors who had stopped submitting ideas.

Tracing three past initiatives showed the pattern quickly: ideas were plentiful and the campaign was popular, but every pilot needed sign-off from four committees, and the average wait for a decision was longer than the pilot itself. In the calibration session, the group rated "process" and "leadership behaviour" as weak, while "culture" was rated stronger than leadership expected.

The three moves were: a single monthly decision forum with authority to fund small pilots; a rule that every pilot names the operations manager who will own it if it works; and replacing the "ideas submitted" target with "pilots decided within 30 days". A year later the same descriptors showed process moving from weak to developing, and the board conversation had shifted from "why nothing launches" to "which pilots to scale".

Do's and don'ts

Do

• Tie the assessment to a decision before you start.
• Write descriptors in your organisation's language and test them on two people before using them.
• Interview the people who gave up, not only the champions.
• Record the evidence behind every rating, so next year's assessment can be compared fairly.
• Share the result with the people you interviewed. It builds trust for the next round.

Don't

• Don't rely on a self-assessment survey filled in by the innovation team. It measures their hopes.
• Don't turn the result into a single number. A score invites argument about the score instead of action on the causes.
• Don't compare units against each other in a league table. It teaches units to perform for the assessment.
• Don't claim alignment with ISO 56001 or any external measurement unless you have checked the actual requirements. Borrowing vocabulary is not the same as conforming.
• Don't let the report become the deliverable. The three moves are the deliverable.

Where to go next in this hub

Each piece in the maturity and measurement hub goes deeper on one part of the picture:

• ISO 56001 explained for practitioners: what the requirements standard asks for and how to approach it.
• ISO 56001 vs ISO 56002: requirements versus guidance, and which you need.
• How to prepare for Qiyas innovation measurement: for Saudi government entities.
• How to measure innovation: the KPIs that matter: the performance side of the picture.
• Counting ideas is the worst innovation KPI: why volume targets backfire.
• Evidence assessors accept: building proof through the year.
• Reporting innovation to the board on one page: turning the result into a conversation leaders act on.

Questions people ask

Is there an official innovation maturity model? Not one single official scale. ISO 56001:2024 sets requirements for an innovation management system and ISO/TR 56004:2019 gives guidance on assessing innovation management, but neither forces you into a particular five-level ladder. Most maturity models you will find are interpretations by consultancies or researchers. Use them for vocabulary, and write descriptors that fit your own organisation.

How long does an innovation maturity assessment take? For one unit, a careful assessment usually fits into four to six weeks of part-time effort: a week to define descriptors, two to three weeks of interviews and evidence, a calibration session, and a week to agree the moves. What takes longer is acting on it, which is why the assessment should end with only three moves.

Should we hire an external assessor? An outsider helps when people will not speak candidly to an internal team, or when you are preparing for certification or an external measurement and want an honest rehearsal. Keep ownership of the descriptors and the decisions inside the organisation, or the result will feel like someone else's opinion.

Close

To run the evidence-gathering well, start with stakeholder interviews and benchmarking; to turn the result into moves, use portfolio mapping and a KPI tree. All method guides are in the guides index.