Introduction

Innovation is one of the engines that drive many industries around the world. Innovation, though, comes with the high cost of research and development. Companies who invest in innovative advances must justify the investment to executives, board members and share holders. This justification most often comes through sampling the population to measure the positive response to innovative products or services. It is the projection of numbers obtained through sampling the population that determines whether an innovation is developed or not.

Corporations often decide to not undertake a new innovation because the projected numbers from sampling do not justify the ROI (Return On Investment).

The True Innovator service, as identified by the True Innovator Scale, addresses this issue by providing a service to clients that more clearly defines those in the population who might embrace innovative products or services.

Most standard innovation measures are ones that account as innovators only those that measure themselves at the very top of the innovation scale. The True Innovator service, as identified by the True Innovator Scale, provides a service to our clients that uniquely captures innovators from a new perspective. This service helps corporations identify leading edge as well as trusted brand innovators. Broadening the definition and understanding of consumers who embrace innovation provides our clients with the opportunity to identify a broader population of consumers who embrace innovation, thus allowing them to more strongly justify the investment needed to create an innovative product or service.

The True Innovator service provides corporations with a greater opportunity to broaden their offerings to consumers, strengthen their corporate and brand image and increase their profitability.

Background

Strategic Vision has developed a unique measure of innovators that has been over looked in the past. Previously, most scales on innovation were Likert scales whose measures created a range that went from "followers of the masses" to "leading edge innovators." Other scales were discreet measures of innovation and only those who positioned themselves at the top of the scale were defined as innovators.

J. Susan Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision, working with Dr. Darrel Edwards, developed a discreet ordinal scale that allows us to uniquely capture innovators from a new perspective that had never been considered previously. The scale can be a four part discreet ordinal scale that identifies leading edge innovators as well as innovators who are open to making leading edge decisions within brands they trust. This identification moves the innovation segment from 10% of the population to 40% - 50% of the population, depending on the product or service category.

The True Innovator Scale and the service it provides save corporations from losing real innovative product or service development because the total population may show a luke-warm response to new and innovative products. Leading edge innovators, measured by other scales produces some variation in their response, but those so identified often do not justify product development and the investment required. But using the True Innovator ordinal scale, identified uniquely by that title, captures the population more broadly including those who trust the brand and are willing to consider innovation of that brand. This segment of the population can now be reliably identified as early adopters or buyers and thought leaders within the brands they trust.

Capturing leading edge innovators plus trusted brand innovators equals true innovators within a population.

Using the True Innovator scale led to a reanalysis of Whirlpool data associated with the development of the front loading washing machine placed upon a pedestal. The reanalysis captured the true merits of the innovation which had been lost using other scales that identified only leading edge innovators within the population.