42% of CEOs Doubt Their Company's Future: A Guide to Corporate Innovation

A staggering 42% of CEOs fear that their company may not be financially successful in the next decade, according to a recent 2025 PwC study. 

This statistic highlights the urgency for businesses to evolve and future-proof their operations. 

The encouraging news? 63% of global CEOs are already taking steps to reinvent or transform their business models. 

However, successful transformation requires more than just ambition — it demands a Corporate Innovation Framework that ensures resources are allocated to the most promising initiatives, tracks progress effectively, and maintains strategic focus.

In today’s article, we’ll explore the most common obstacles companies face in innovation and how adopting a structured framework can unlock new growth opportunities.

Let’s dive in!

5 Key Aspects of Corporate Innovation Frameworks

A corporate innovation framework encompasses various components, including:

• Clear governance structures, 
• Defined processes for idea generation and evaluation and 
• Mechanisms to measure, assess, and report the impact of innovation efforts. 

By integrating these elements, you can ensure the creation of relevant ideas and systematically evaluate and prioritize them based on their potential to drive meaningful outcomes.

1. Established and Aligned Innovation Objectives

Without a well-defined innovation framework, teams may focus on initiatives that don’t contribute meaningfully to the organization's core objectives. 

This can lead to wasted resources in terms of time and finances and may cause frustration among employees eager to contribute to impactful projects.

Note: Therefore, you should align with key stakeholders, ensure goals match budget and timeline, and define innovation objectives based on your strategy, market trends, and priorities. 

rready's AI-native platform allows you to inspire employees with concrete ideas - sent directly to their email inbox - based on their strengths and the company's objection and focus fields. See here.

2. Guidance for Innovation Teams

Establishing and managing effective innovation teams is essential for driving corporate innovation.

To do so, teams must have a clear understanding of what innovation means within the context of the organization.

Besides specific innovation objectives, you need an established roadmap with milestones and KPIs to track progress throughout the innovation journey.

It's important to address things like who makes decisions and how they choose whether a project advances to the next stage of the innovation process or not. 

A flexible team structure allows for adaptability as projects evolve, ensuring team members can pivot with their ideas, to address changing market conditions or internal requirements.

Note:

The Kickbox methodology is an innovation framework that helps employees turn their ideas into validated projects.

With the KICKBOOK, a central component of the KICKBOX Intrapreneurship program, your employees will understand where they are in the innovation process and what actions to take next.

Furthermore, employees will take ownership of their ideas, leading to a decentralized innovation process with centralized oversight.

3. Risk Mitigation

Establishing a structured risk management framework is essential for: 

• Identifying, 
• Assessing, and 
• Mitigating risks throughout the innovation process.

A clear framework enables your teams to pursue innovation in a controlled manner while being aware of potential risks.

Here are some risk-mitigation strategies:

• Foster a culture that values risk management and where employees feel comfortable sharing concerns about potential risks.
• Involve diverse stakeholders in risk identification to enhance the understanding of potential risks.
  
  

Techniques such as brainstorming sessions, SWOT analysis, and expert consultations can uncover risks a homogenous group might overlook.

Furthermore, the AI-native rready platform enables you to define ‘Risk Agents’, supporting your innovators to run automatically a risk assessment of the ideas being able to uncover blind spots. 

• Diversify innovation efforts and spread investments across multiple projects to reduce the impact of individual failures. It will ensure the overall portfolio remains robust even if some projects fail.
• Conduct prototyping and testing so you can fail fast, eliminate uncertainty and learn from each iteration. Consequently, you can fine-tune ideas based on real-world data.
• Regularly monitor the effectiveness of risk management strategies to identify risks on time and respond to emerging risks.

4. Encouraging a Culture of Innovation

There are many different methodologies and approaches to corporate innovation. Regardless of the option you choose, your employees need to be invested in the process. 

This helps to cultivate a culture that values creativity and learning from mistakes.

When employees aren’t afraid of making mistakes, they are more likely to ideate and contribute ideas.

One way to ignite the spark is to implement recognition programs that celebrate contributions to innovation transparently, regardless of how big or small they are.

Motivating and rewarding your employees is beneficial, but it's important to ensure their efforts also contribute to furthering the overarching business goals.

Note: You should always accompany innovation efforts and creativity by KPI tracking and reporting.

ProTip:

Through various gamified, actionable templates, maps, and engagement tools, KICKBOX encourages employees to continuously test and improve their ideas while getting rewards for their contributions.

For example, you can enable digital wallets for your employees to book experts and provide access to necessary tools and coaching for their innovation journey.

Or, your employees can gather gamified badges within the system for their contribution, such as receiving a LinkedIn certificate verifying their learnings. 

5. Iterative Learning and Improvement

There is a golden rule that applies to any business model: It’s much more profitable and affordable to retain employees than invest in training new ones.

The same is true when it comes to unleashing innovation in your company.

It’s much easier and more economical to help your employees upgrade and learn new skills than to train a new employee from scratch. 

After all, your existing employees already know the product and the process and have a much deeper understanding. 

This way, you can respond promptly to customer feedback and have a faster time to market.

Continuous feedback is integral to the iterative process, so collecting insights from users, stakeholders, and team members after each iteration can help you identify areas for improvement.

7 Phases of the Corporate Innovation Process

The corporate innovation process typically involves several distinct phases. Naturally, it doesn’t have to be the exact phases below, but tailored to your company’s needs.

1. Idea Generation

This initial phase focuses on brainstorming and generating a wide range of ideas. 

You can boost creativity in your team through various techniques such as workshops, brainstorming sessions, and market research. 

rready provides an ideation workshop leveraging Artificial Intelligence: Employees learn how to prompt to iterate on a problem and find potential solutions. 

The goal is to explore possibilities without immediate evaluation, allowing for a free flow of innovative concepts.

ProTip:

With rready’s modular corporate innovation solution, you can optimize innovation through efficient idea sourcing, assessment, and management.

With our Idea Management solution,  your employees can:

• Search and select relevant topics
• Get inspired by AI-created ideas - based on their experience and company objectives
• Name and describe their idea.
• Get support from AI to reformulate or enrich their idea with data and information.
• Add extra information in video format, attachments, links, feedback, tags, etc.
• Submit their ideas for campaigns and topics.
• Upload or generate images using AI
  
  

Here, employees can provide immediate feedback and evaluate ideas with the Scorecard and Feedback tools. 

Meanwhile, the granular roles and permission management system gives admins precise control over user actions, enhancing security and efficiency.

Note: rready leverages AI, allowing you to streamline the innovation process more effectively and save precious time with our AI-native suite.

For example, you can:

• Avoid language barriers, search for tickets and ideas in other languages, and have them automatically translated into your preferred language.
• Automatically detect potential duplicate ideas and related ideas.
  
  

2. Screening and Evaluation

Once ideas are generated, the next step involves screening them for feasibility and market potential. 

This phase assesses which ideas are worth pursuing based on criteria like: 

• alignment with business objectives, 
• technical feasibility, desirability, viability, and 
• potential ROI. 

The idea evaluation needs to be defined by taking the company’s setup and innovation goals into consideration. 

An evaluation can be done by putting ideas to the practice test and validating them with the KICKBOX methodology. 

Alternatively, a subject matter expert can record their perspective on the idea, or a trained AI agent can assess the project's potential. 

rready’s experienced innovation team consults enterprises such as Tetra Pak or BMW in setting up the according evaluation processes.

Regardless of the chosen method, the goal of the evaluation stays the same: Only the most promising ideas move forward to the next stage to ensure wise budget spending.

The ideas that are moved to the next phase need to be focused on gathering data to prove, step-by-step, the potential of the idea. 

One way to do so is to run interviews with potential customers or experts. 

When preparing for an interview to gather customer feedback, it is vital to approach it with an open mind and the right attitude. 

Active listening is key — Allow the interviewee to do most of the talking without trying to sell your idea or propose solutions prematurely.

You should find out what kind of solution your target customer wants: 

• what they would be prepared to pay for, 
• what criteria they use to decide, 
• what is important to them, etc.
  
  

Note: Don’t ask hypothetical questions, such as “Would you…?”, instead, ask about past situations, such as “When was the last time you…?”. This way, you’ll get facts instead  of opinions.

3. Prototyping and Development

In this phase, selected ideas are developed into prototypes or MVPs. Your teams create tangible representations to test functionality and gather user feedback. 

This iterative process allows you and your team to refine the product based on real data and insights.

The key to successful prototyping lies in adopting a prototyping mindset, which emphasizes that initial prototypes don't need to be perfect. 

The goal is to depict the essential elements of your solution that will help users visualize how it works and stimulate constructive feedback. 

Thus, it’s crucial to prepare your prototypes for solution interviews. 

When creating a prototype, you can choose from various formats, such as: 

• a simple paper sketch, 
• a software paper prototype,
• a cardboard model, or even 
• a digital mockup. 

Before using it in interviews, consider showing it to a few colleagues for initial feedback, and be prepared for many changes before it evolves into the final product.

The earlier you can determine whether your product appeals to customers, the less effort and money you will invest in a product that won’t succeed in the market.

ProTip:

One of our peers, Implenia, emphasized the importance of prototyping as part of its innovation initiatives, particularly within the framework of the KICKBOX program.

A Kickboxer rigged up a prototype to facilitate the easy use of data collected from construction site microtunneling. 

This prototype helped analyze tunnel boring machine data, showcasing the prototyping approach: 

• start with a basic model, 
• refine it through feedback, and 
• improve over time. 

The focus wasn’t on perfection but on sparking discussion and innovation, which encouraged creativity and collaboration, bringing fresh ideas to the traditionally rigid construction industry.

4. Testing & Prototyping

The testing phase involves rigorous validation of prototypes through user testing, market trials, and feedback that helps you identify strengths and weaknesses and make necessary adjustments.

For example, Dropbox originally began with a three-minute screen recording to present its service (which didn’t exist yet). 

This allowed Dropbox to test whether there was a customer need for its service in an affordable way. 

They used the comment section beneath the video to adapt the product development to suit customer needs and to attract genuine prospective customers for its market launch.

It’s important to watch how users physically interact with the prototype and their reactions to determine which aspects resonate, which are confusing, and what improvements you can make.

Try getting answers to the following questions:

• Which aspect of the product did the target person find useful?
• Which function is an absolute must-have?
• What does the interviewee understand right away?

The interview process is also a great opportunity to test a possible price, not just a product. Here’s how:

• Pricing Sub-page: For digital prototypes, create a sub-page within your app or website that displays the proposed pricing. This allows potential customers to see the costs involved while interacting with the prototype.
  
• Physical Prototype Price Tags: If your prototype is a physical product, attach a price tag to it to visually represent the product’s cost to users and provide a tangible context for them to consider.

This approach enables you to refine your pricing strategy and make adjustments to make the product more appealing to your target audience.

5. Implementation

Once testing is successful, the innovation moves into implementation, where the product or service is launched into the market. 

This phase includes executing marketing strategies, establishing distribution channels, and ensuring operational readiness. 

Don’t forget to include the rough costs of implementing and operating your solution.

ProTip:

As part of rready’s innovation platform, you can use AI agents that support the innovators in validating the ideas and enhancing the submission of ideas. 

The AI Agent accesses company data and proposes the next step to make the implementation easier for you.

6. Monitoring and Iteration

After launch, you need to monitor performance metrics to evaluate the innovation's success continuously. However, don’t forget that you need to monitor the ideas all the way, from submission to implementation.

Gathering ongoing feedback allows you to make iterative improvements, adapt to changing market conditions, and refine your offerings.

Pro Tip:

rready enables you to track various KPIs , such as employee engagement, the progress of ideas as they move through the innovation funnel, and many others.

You can create custom reports and visualize key statistics with reporting and dashboards for effortless real-time data sharing and analysis. 

7. Scaling and Integration

The final phase focuses on scaling successful innovations across the organization or integrating them into existing operations. 

It ensures the innovations achieve long-term sustainability and impact within your company. 

Remember our client Implenia? 

Implementing innovation within Implenia's KICKBOX program included strategies for scaling and integrating new ideas into the existing business structure. 

Karel van Eechoud, Innovation Manager at Implenia, emphasized the significance of fostering an innovation culture as more impactful than just the ideas coming out of the program. 

A critical component of the KICKBOX program involved ensuring that participants signed off with their line managers before moving to the BlueBox phase. 

This requirement formalized the commitment but also facilitated the integration of these new initiatives into the participants' regular workflow, thereby supporting the smoother implementation of innovative concepts into the company’s operations. 

This partnership between innovation teams and line managers was essential in scaling successful ideas throughout the organization.

Note: Regardless of the innovation program or model you use, it needs to be adaptive and flexible.

In Implenia’s case, the KICKBOX program evolved based on feedback and the unique circumstances within the construction industry. 

The Role of AI in Corporate Innovation Frameworks

AI fundamentally transforms corporate innovation frameworks by enhancing processes, improving decision-making, and fostering creativity. 

Its integration into various phases of the innovation cycle allows your organization to automate and streamline certain aspects:

• Analyze market data and consumer trends from various sources, identifying opportunities for innovation.
• Boost traditional brainstorming and propose innovative concepts or variations on existing ideas.
• Automate surveys and sentiment analysis, providing real-time insights into consumer behavior.
• Facilitate decision-making through predictive analytics, allowing you to evaluate the potential of innovation projects based on historical data and market trends.
• Mitigate unconscious biases that often hinder innovation, such as confirmation bias or groupthink, by offering objective analyses.
• Facilitate the prototyping stage by creating virtual simulations that allow your team to visualize the potential impact and feasibility.

Overall, using AI in the innovation process can help you unlock new levels of innovation potential by

• Analyzing vast datasets to uncover hidden trends and unmet needs, 
• Automating repetitive tasks to free up human creativity, and 
• Providing valuable insights to guide decision-making at every stage of development, from ideation to market launch.

The Common Challenges When Implementing an Innovation Framework

Although implementing an innovation framework can be a transformative step for your organization, it comes with challenges during the process:

• Cultural Resistance — Traditional management styles may prioritize existing processes and short-term profits over creative thinking, leading to resistance against new ideas. Moreover, employees may fear that innovation efforts could detract from their daily responsibilities or disrupt established workflows.
  
• Lack of Ownership and Accountability — Without clear ownership of innovation initiatives, projects may lack direction and accountability. Organizations often struggle to identify who is responsible for driving innovation, which can lead to confusion and inaction.
  
• Insufficient Resources — Innovation requires substantial resources, including time, funding, and skilled personnel. Thus, you may feel constrained by limited resources, making it difficult to pursue innovative projects effectively. Consequently, the lack of resources can hinder the ability to fully experiment and explore new ideas.
  
• Bureaucratic Processes — Excessive bureaucracy can stifle creativity and slow innovation. Rigid structures and lengthy approval processes may create obstacles that prevent teams from quickly adapting their ideas or adapt to market changes.

• Misalignment with Business Goals — Innovation efforts must align with your organization’s strategic objectives. Otherwise, you risk them becoming disjointed or irrelevant. 

• Inadequate Benchmarking and Metrics — Focusing solely on immediate financial returns or traditional performance metrics can discourage your team from pursuing long-term innovative projects that may not yield quick results but are essential for future growth.
  
• A Fear of Failure — A fear of failure can inhibit risk-taking, which is essential for innovation. Employees may hesitate to present new ideas if they believe failure will lead to negative consequences. 

Successfully implementing an innovation framework requires addressing these challenges head-on to create an environment that fosters sustained innovation and growth.

How Can rready Help You Implement A Corporate Innovation Framework?

rready provides AI-native innovation management solutions and tooling to empower and encourage your employees to ideate, contribute, validate, and execute ideas via a single platform.

Combining rready Idea Management, KICKBOX Intrapreneurship, and rready Innovation Management or utilizing these tools individually allows you to:

• Tailor the platform to your unique needs.
  
• Validate ideas to see if they are worth pursuing.
  
• Structure employees' thoughts and streamline their processes as they move from raw ideas to Proof-of-Concept.
  
• Monitor your entire innovation funnel without the risk of missing a promising idea.
  
• Motivate employees to participate actively with the help of gamified tools.
  
• Help your employees upgrade their skill set through participation, regardless of their educational or work background.

With the right approach and tooling, you can avoid the common pitfalls and successfully set your organization on an innovation journey.

Interested?

Get access to our free demo today and learn how to create a corporate innovation framework bottom up to implement it across the whole organization.

Learn More:

• Innovation vs. Invention in Corporate Dynamics
• How to Nurture an Intrapreneurial Mindset
• 9 Innovation Management Frameworks You Should Know About