identified as applicable in this regard: IBM (2004), Hering and Phillips (2005), Taylor (2005), and Kelly and Littman (2006). What then commenced was a distillation process that involved combining the overlapping roles and reducing them to the most essential core roles. Reducing them to the core was a primary objective because these roles would be used within the questionnaire, where it would be impractical to provide a lengthy list for respondents to identify with (see Section 6.1.4.1 for more on the implementation of the roles within the questionnaire). The number of roles presented by the literature ranged from 7 in Taylor (2005) to 24 in IBM (2004). As would be imagined, the level of detail at which each of the roles was being represented also differed substantially.
The details of the distillation process are presented in Figure 63 (Appendix H). The roles from the literature were related to one another, consolidated and then reduced to the core innovation roles in this table. The 5 innovation roles and representative descriptions that emerged from this process are as follows:
Networker – Scan market, industry, technology, regulatory and societal trends to understand potential futures and identify latent opportunities. Create connections between internal and external individuals, teams and organisations that have common or complementary objectives.
Coordinator – Balance project objectives, resources and risk. Contextualise, position and promote opportunities and concepts. Prioritise, plan, coordinate, schedule, and assure completion of projects. Overcome or outsmart obstacles faced during projects.
Builder – Make tangible concepts of ideas, demonstrate concepts, obtain feedback from colleagues and customers, and refine concepts. Build, test and refine working "products" and ensure "production" readiness. Strive towards the initial vision of the concept with minimal compromise for design, production and delivery.
Anthropologist – Develop understanding of how people interact physically and emotionally with products, services, one another and their environment. Transform the physical environment into a tool to influence behaviour and attitude, enabling individuals to do their best work. Anticipate and service the needs of colleagues, customers, suppliers and other stakeholders.
Leader – Align activities with strategy and objectives. Build and involve teams of the "right" individuals at the "right" time. Evaluate and prioritise opportunities and ideas against a standard framework considering all business requirements. Guide progress, monitor metrics and instigate corrective action. Build synergy into projects and the organisation.
As mentioned, these roles were used within the questionnaire to add the necessary context to the individuals‟ responses and assist with the generation, interpretation and presentation of results.
As mentioned previously, there are 3 supplementary components of the model that support the execution of the Innovation Capability Improvement Methodology. These 3 components are briefly discussed in this section.
6.1.4.1
Innovation Capability Questionnaire
In order for the innovation capability maturity of an organisation to be determined, a mechanism is required to relate the situation within that organisation to the contents and structure of the ICMM v2. The innovation capability questionnaire is intended to fulfil that purpose. The process is, therefore, reliant on the organisation‟s members relaying that situation to the analyst via the questionnaire (the effectiveness thereof discussed in much detail in Chapter 7). The first page of the questionnaire appears in Appendix I (the remainder thereof may be deduced from the contents of Appendix G). The questionnaire itself consists of the following sections:
Respondent general information – includes name, contact details, number of years in organisation, basic description of day to day activities, etc. This section may be adapted to capture specific information that may assist in the interpretation of results for a specific organisation.
Role description – the innovation role profile of a respondent is determined using the Innovation Roles of Section 6.1.3. Individuals are only exposed to and/or responsible for certain requirements. This influences their responses and needs to be accounted for during interpretation. Therefore, it is essential that the profile provided by the respondent be as accurate as possible.
Innovation status description – the respondent is tasked with providing a once-off rating of the organisation‟s innovation capability maturity. Additionally, each progressive description of innovation capability maturity links with a corresponding status of innovation-based outcomes. This once-off rating is later related to the outcomes of the overall results of the case studies to determine the relevance thereof (see Section 7.6.3).
42 Capability Requirement questions – there is a question for to each of the Innovation Capability Requirements. The procedure is for the respondent to relate the situation within his/her organisation to the maturity level descriptions (as mentioned in Section 6.1.2) and mark the level that corresponds with the internal situation.
The design of the questionnaire was a fairly basic process with the primary objective of minimising the respondents‟ time to complete the questionnaire, but still extracting the necessary information. Therefore, only certain basic principles were used in the design thereof as prescribed by Zikmund (2003). The author must concede, however, that the questionnaire, and the mechanisms required to ensure unbiased responses or detect bias, should be addressed further. While the questions are simple and direct, there is no cross-
improvement areas are discussed in Section 8.3.
6.1.4.2
Role-based and aggregated normalisation of responses
The utilisation of a roles-based normalisation mechanism is based on the premise that individuals, and their specific role within the organisation, are related to capability requirements via their exposure to or responsibility for those requirements. This would influence the manner in which they answered the questions relating to those requirements. This should, in turn, influence the consolidation and interpretation of their responses. In order to do this, a normalisation process was devised based primarily on the role profile provided by the individuals in the questionnaire.
Other normalising parameters are also applied to aggregate the detailed results and establish the high-level construct-based results (shown in Figure 47 for instance). The 3 parameter sets are as follows (as depicted in Figure 33):
Parameter Set 1 – based on the participants‟ roles profiles (obtained from questionnaires) and for a particular role, each of the contributions from each of the participants is normalised so that the sum of all those contributions is 1. Each participant‟s relative contribution to a particular role is, therefore, the weighting applied to that participant‟s responses.
Parameter Set 2 – the different roles have different exposure to and responsibility for the capability requirements. A particular role may be a primary, secondary or limited role-player in the fulfilment of a requirement. Accordingly, the respective weightings of 1, 0.5 and 0.0 (which may be slightly adjusted to accommodate for the requirements of a particular organisation) are applied to the 3 role-player “levels”. This role-player level assignment to each of the capability requirements may be seen in Appendix G (columns 3, 4 and 5).
Parameter Set 3 – as depicted in Figure 32, the 42 capability requirement do not map on a one-to- one basis to the constructs. Therefore, the rating obtained for a particular capability requirement (having implemented weightings 1 and 2) is mapped onto the constructs based directly on the mapping shown in Figure 32. This implies, for instance, that the rating obtained for the requirement Balancing the innovation portfolio (IP/SO2) is linearly distributed amongst the Portfolio Management, Consolidate & Exploit and Process Control & Risk Management innovation capability construct items (i.e. each construct item receiving 33.3% of the requirement‟s rating in contribution to its totals). This weighting, therefore, accounts for the explicit interrelations between the capability requirements and provides a more representative aggregation of the results.
This process, therefore, intentionally biases the responses of individuals that have more exposure to and responsibility for specific Innovation Capability Requirements, thereby reducing the variance in the overall representation of results (seen in the case studies of Chapter 7). The responses of individuals who have less exposure to particular requirements, and whose responses are logically more deviant from the actual
with a sensitivity analysis in Section 7.6.2.