…doesn’t happen enough, says Line56, reporting on an Accenture study: “while CEOs see innovative ideas as the path to competitive advantage, less than one in five companies are able to commercialize promising ideas.”

In case you don’t have time to read the report, here’s Accenture’s four-stage process for making sure innovation actually happens:

1. Sourcing and discovering ideas


2. Connecting the right resources to the right ideas


3. Transforming ideas to novel products, processes and services


4. Scaling value creation

Looks to me as though No. 3 is probably the most difficult to do. The transformation of ideas into novel and usable services, processes and products is itself worthy of, and in fact requires, a hefty amount of creative thought, problem-solving, and idea-generation. In fact, a terrific way to do this would be to use all those ideas already floating around (in the survey, more than 75% of executives said "there is no shortage of new ideas" in their companies) as points of departure for new ideation on how to transform these raw ideas into usable processes and saleable services and products.


FYI, you might also check out Chief Executive magazine’s June 2002 issue, themed Turning Ideas Into Results, where the Accenture study results were also reported. Lots of other interesting articles about innovation there.