Creative innovation is certainly one of the keys to future success for a modern business, but the road to effective innovation capability can lead to many destinations. It is important for organizations to understand what each of these destinations can offer in terms of benefits and what the likely costs and impacts of the journey will be, only then can the leaders of an organization decide on how great a distance they need to travel and how fast they need to go.

The pace of market change, operational complexity, technology availability, financial risk and delivery capacity are a few of these issues but so are vision, values and culture.

Many businesses do recognize the importance of innovation, but how many of them have a cohesive strategy for achieving effective innovation and how many understand the issues and select the correct road?