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The purpose of the paper is to emphasize the performance benefits of a long-term innovation and value creation perspective. This paper responds to the recent concept of the imagination premium method for valuing companies. It offers four key takeaways to create a long-term innovation-focused orientation for future value creation.

The research is based on both consulting experience and insight from several studies of executives that were supported by the U.S. Conference Board.

The research differentiates how high versus low innovators create long-term perspectives and value. High innovators have explicit processes that support innovation, leadership that focuses on long-term performance, resources committed to long-term projects and innovation and knowledge management systems that transfer knowledge throughout the organization.

The research offers strategic directives aimed at creating long-term value but acknowledges that there are other means to accomplish such objectives.

This paper offers strategies for executives to create an innovation-focused organizational culture that drives lasting long-term value.

Focusing on long-term innovation prioritizes larger social, environmental and business objectives over superficial short-term stock price changes, leading to greater value-creation.

This paper advocates that leadership play the long game and adopt a longer-term view of innovation due to its long-term competitive, employee engagement, sustainability and performance benefits.

This paper aims to present a framework that includes six essential factors and four strategic intervention points that provide the necessary context to sustain and support innovation.

Based on our academic and consulting experience, this article summarizes our knowledge of what it takes to be a top innovator and how organizations should best pursue innovation agendas. The model presented is supported by our research which considers assessments from 3,642 employee responses assessing the innovation cultures of organizations.

We find that companies need to ask six questions to assess their innovation cultures. These questions relate to creativity, incentives, processes, leadership, knowledge management and resources. Our framework presents four intervention points to support implementing and sustaining an innovation culture including objectives, behaviors and actions, context and management for execution.

Our framework is effective, but we acknowledge that there are other means to creating and sustaining an innovation culture.

We present six questions that companies need to ask themselves to assess their innovation culture and offer strategies to enhance it.

Given the contribution of innovation culture to competitiveness and performance, our recommendations will allow managers to set themselves apart from their competition and further their financial and nonfinancial corporate objectives.

Everyone likes the idea of change, but it is the process of change that is difficult. We offer strategies that put such intentions to work.

Prior innovation orientation research has mostly focused on performance consequences, with some recent work examining its relationship with innovative practices such as open innovation. Yet, despite this growing body of open innovation research, there are still gaps and limitations. Notably, most prior studies have been conducted in Europe, limiting their generalizability to the rest of the world, and are replicative, exploring performance and competitive outcomes. There is very limited work examining the potential limitations of open innovation. This study extends innovation orientation research and examines the limitations of open innovation in North America.

This study explores the relationships between innovation orientation and performance, open innovation and performance and innovation orientation and open innovation among 386 North American companies.

This study is novel as it examines the relationships between innovation orientation and performance, open innovation and performance and innovation orientation and open innovation among North American companies. The research uncovers a linear relationship between innovation orientation and performance, a correlation between innovation orientation and open innovation and a counterintuitive curvilinear relationship between open innovation and performance. The curvilinear relationship, shaped as an inverted u-shape, suggests there are limitations to the strategy's effectiveness, actionable insight to companies, consultants and scholars alike. In the discussion section, findings are further unpacked with regard to their implications for the scholarly literature. The paper concludes with managerial considerations for creating an innovation orientation and the most effective level of open innovation for maximum competitive and performance implications.

Beyond the innovation orientation and open innovation research contributions, this study offers managerial insight for executives seeking to enhance competitiveness and drive firm performance.

In an era where competitive landscapes are changing dynamically, traditional strategic approaches are no longer delivering the value required to support growth in many organizations. In response, many organizations have pursued an innovation agenda, but with mixed results. This paper offers five implementation “shifts” for more effective strategy execution.

Based on two recent global innovation studies, five strategy shifts were identified, permitting organizations to amplify their strategy without having to completely abandon current methods. These shifts were derived by analyzing the most polarizing differences between high innovative organizations and low innovative organizations in the global innovation studies.

The five strategy shifts include the engagement in innovation culture management, strategic external collaborations, advanced technologies, innovation methodologies, and measurement of innovation.

Examples of how organizations can operationalize strategy shifts are provided so executives can increase innovativeness and see how traditional strategic approaches fall short.

This article aims to highlight the results of a Global Innovation Survey from 407 organizations representing 33 countries. This was the third of three surveys conducted by the researchers since 2011. Ten key insights were formulated to gauge the progress of innovation in organizations as well as the practice and success of nine innovation methods (data analytics, design thinking, innovation metrics, etc.) used to support innovation execution.

The survey data was bifurcated into two groups, high and low innovators, by analyzing their innovation scores using a K-means cluster analysis. This was followed by correlational analysis with the innovation practices by these groups. Qualitative survey data was also collected and used to interpret the results.

Overall innovation scores have improved over the decade. Organizations are still struggling with process drivers such as idea management and innovation measures. High innovators are pervasively using innovative methods to advance innovation execution much more than low innovators. The two methods that showed the highest correlation to an innovative culture were design thinking and open innovation.

Comparing the Global Innovation Survey to two other surveys, 2011 Canadian Executives (n = 605) and 2013 US Fortune 1000 (n = 1,203) that use the same innovation measurement scale, provides a unique longitudinal perspective. The nine innovation methods investigated in the Global Innovation Survey provide original insight into how high and low innovative organizations are using methods to advance innovation execution.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an opinion of current strategic thinking in North American organizations. By doing so, the paper presents a strategic model organizations can use that focuses on clarity.

The opinion and strategic framework was informed by authors’ research and consulting experiences over the past 10 years with leading companies across a variety of sectors.

Many organizations struggle with the strategic tradeoff between control, agility and risk and end up with complicated bureaucratic strategies. The strategic framework of clarity poses five questions that provides clear guidance for achieving focus.

Business leaders can apply the clarity framework to their existing strategic processes. By doing so, they can re-assess strategy and optimize their actions and outcomes to re-focus their strategic thinking in light of the new economy.

The paper offers a fresh perspective and opinion on strategy using familiar examples to executives. The clarity strategy framework provides executives with a simple but focused alternative to avoid strategic traps and learn from success and failure examples.

The USA is the world’s largest economy, but is it a leading innovation nation? As economies mature and slow in growth, innovation will prove to be a key driver in maintaining transient advantage. This article presents a pulse on innovation in the USA as F1000 C-suite executives weigh in on their organization’s innovation health. It also compares the US score with proxy benchmark measures in other countries, and provides operational and strategic considerations to advance innovation platforms in US organizations. Managers will gain insight into common hurdles faced by some of America’s most prominent companies, as well as how to improve innovation practices in their own organization.

This current article reports on findings of innovation health in the USA based on responses from 1,127 F1000 executives (manager level and higher). F1000 executives report their innovation culture through completion of an innovation culture model survey developed by the authors. The F1000 is a listing created by Fortune magazine detailing the 1,000 largest companies in the USA based on revenues. This survey is considered one of the largest surveys on innovation culture in the USA to date.

One of the leading questions that this survey set out to answer is the current measure of innovation orientation amongst America’s largest organizations. Our findings suggest that US business is just beginning to catch the wave of innovation. Other major findings include: innovation amongst the F1000 is average at best; innovation is random and incremental; innovation strategy is missing in most organizations; there is an executive/employee innovation perception gap; innovation governance is missing; employees can not be blamed for a lack of innovation; and companies that fail to innovate will struggle even more.

There are a number of operational and strategic considerations presented to support the advancement of innovation in organizations. These include considerations around the leadership, resources, knowledge management and execution to strategically support innovation.

This is an original contribution in that it uses a scientifically developed model to measure innovation culture. It is the largest survey of innovation to date amongst the US Fortune 1000, and the finding present considerations to advance the innovation agendas of organizations.

Academic and practitioner interest has focused on innovation as a method of competitive differentiation and as a way to create customer value. However, less attention has been devoted to developing a measure of innovation culture. The purpose of this paper is to develop an empirically‐based comprehensive instrument for measuring an organization's innovation culture.

This paper describes a procedure which explicates the innovation culture construct, and proposes a multi‐item measure of innovation culture predicated on exploratory factor analysis. These descriptors were derived from extant literature, key informant interviews, and a survey of over 282 employees from the financial services industry.

Findings suggest that an innovation culture scale may best be represented through a structure that consists of seven factors identified as innovation propensity, organizational constituency, organizational learning, creativity and empowerment, market orientation, value orientation, and implementation context.

The seven‐factor model can be used both descriptively and diagnostically. Among other things, it presents a practical way to measure an organization's innovation culture, and could initially be used to establish a baseline level of innovation culture. From there, it could be used as a metric to chart the organization's efforts as it moves to engender innovation.

More effort should be devoted to developing measures to assess innovation culture specifically. This model presents an innovation culture construct that is complimentary to work that has preceded it. The findings combined with the suggestions provide an alternative perspective as a measure of innovation and extends a basic framework for further investigation.

A survey by Gary Hamel's company (Strategos) identified that over 80 percent of senior managers agreed that innovation creates a strong source of competitive advantage, and 90 percent indicated that innovation is highly valued. Yet these same companies rated themselves poorly at innovation. This paper sets out to consider behaviors and traits that will help organizations to successfully innovate.

Recent articles have attempted to use the concept of scientific DNA as a metaphor to describe characteristics of an organization. Many of these are descriptive and refer to basic core activities that managers need to concern themselves with. This article presents an analogy of DNA for the business perspective. There are certain behaviors and traits – call them innovation genes – that are foundational to innovation. It is believed that the sequence presented is this paper represents the basic building blocks for organizational innovation.

The paper finds that the innovation DNA sequence includes employee centric traits of knowledge management, cluster management, value management, and alignment. The context shaping innovation includes employee constituency and empowerment. The outcomes include strategic architecture to support innovation, innovation mapping of strategic initiatives, and value creation. There are competitive and positioning advantages of innovation DNA that promote a sustainable competitive advantage.

Embedding innovation DNA into the organization's fabric elevates organizations to being innovative in everything they do ‐ from knowledge management to value creation, and execution. Its application is universal as it elevates the least common denominator respecting how employees think and act; behaviors which lend life to innovation. As a result, the innovation imperative will only be as good as the organization's lowest common denominator in this respect.

Organizational performance is greatly influenced by employee behaviours and the resulting market orientation that they possess. Market orientation is a behavioural culture that affects strategy formulation and strategy implementation, and how an organization interacts with its environment and adjusts to changes within that context. The relationship between market orientation and performance is robust across several environmental contexts that are characterized by varying degrees of market turbulence, competitive intensity, and products/services introduction rates. This study identifies co‐aligned market orientation and strategy profiles corresponding to unique competitive contexts that represent best practices for an organization seeking to maximize performance in a high technology environment. This relationship becomes dynamic when one considers the assertion that organization culture is synonymous with strategy and the evidence that the external environment affects organizational culture. As a result, the ability to profile ideal orientations will have significant strategic and performance implications for organizations that will contribute to the development of a sustainable competitive advantage.