Leadership Index

How important is innovation to you personally?
This question is to explore how much innovation is a motivator for you personally as a business leader. For example, if you are balancing innovation vs other aspects of the organisation – such as culture, work-life balance, salary – would it matter if there was no innovation?

How innovative are you as a leader?
This question looks at how you see yourself – are you the engine of innovation, or someone who manages it at arm's length?

How energised do you personally feel when working on innovation initiatives?
Do you find innovation genuinely exciting, or does it leave you feeling drained? This question isn’t about whether you’re capable of leading innovation, but about how you feel about it on a personal level.

How comfortable are you with the risk in terms of uncertainty and ambiguity that innovation requires?
Innovation always carries risk – reputational if it fails publicly, financial if the numbers don't stack up, and strategic if it pulls resources from the core business. How comfortable you are with that combination says a great deal about the kind of bets you're willing to make.

How confident are you in your ability to champion innovation within your organisation?
Having a personal commitment to innovation is one thing. Having the political capital, communication skills and sheer persistence to keep a bold idea alive through a system that is often working against it, is something else entirely.

How willing are you to challenge long-standing assumptions or norms in your business?
Most of us like to think we’re open to new ideas and challenge, but it’s often much harder when those ideas question something we’ve built, inherited or championed ourselves. This question explores how willing you are to re-examine established decisions, assumptions and ways of working.

How personally accountable do you feel for driving innovation outcomes?
There is a significant difference between supporting innovation in principle and feeling personally accountable for its success. This question explores whether you see innovation outcomes as part of your own leadership responsibility, or as something owned primarily by specialist teams or functions.

Organisational Index

Does your organisation lean more towards incremental or radical innovation?
Most organisations say they balance both, but in practice the short-term often wins – especially under financial pressure. This question begins to explore where that pressure bites hardest and whether 'balance' is a genuine strategic commitment.

How confident are you in identifying high-value emerging technologies?
Deep tech only matters if leaders can see its potential. This question tests whether you and your organisation have the ability and drive to identify and evaluate high-value emerging technologies before the window closes. This includes the full spectrum, from AI and automation to process technologies that are less discussed but can be just as transformative.

How often does your business invest in exploratory innovation with unclear ROI?
The willingness to fund exploratory work without a clear ROI may be the single clearest indicator of genuine innovation ambition at an organisational level. It is easy to say you believe in deep tech, but much harder to secure budget for something that may not pay off for five years or more.

How mature is your build/partner/acquire decision process for innovation?
How an organisation decides whether to build capability internally, partner externally, or acquire it is a strategic maturity question. Some organisations make this call reactively, based on relationships or whoever shouts loudest, while others have a structured framework that forces the right conversation early.

How important is it for your innovation to produce defensible IP, i.e. patents?
IP is a particularly interesting lens on deep tech investment. For some sectors and organisations, defensible intellectual property (patents, proprietary platforms, trade secrets) is the key commercial driver to pursue innovation. For others, it plays a less prominent role.

How often does your organisation challenge its existing business models?
The willingness to challenge your own business model, especially when it is currently performing, is one of the strongest indicators of long-term competitive resilience. Some may only question the model when a disruptor is already at the door, whereas others self-disrupt by design.

Financial and Boardroom Index

How easy is it for you to justify longer-term innovation investment vs short-term expectations?
The tension between long-term innovation investment and short-term financial expectations is one of most widely discussed blockers to innovation. Quarterly reporting cycles, profitability pressure, and the ease or difficulty of making a business case for something with a five-year payoff all play into this. How easy or hard that justification becomes says a great deal about whether your organisation's financial culture is set up to support innovation.

How flexible is your organisation in funding early-stage ideas?
Having a commitment to innovation in principle is very different from having the resources available to back early ideas before anyone can prove they will work. This question explores whether your organisation has established the financial mechanisms needed to support early-stage innovation, whether that’s a dedicated fund, a discretionary budget, or whether every new idea must fight from scratch through a standard business case process that was designed for operational investment, not exploration.

How disciplined are you in stopping weak projects?
The ability to stop a failing project quickly is the other side of the innovation coin, and many organisations find it more challenging than they expect. Sunk costs, personal attachment, political protection and a reluctance to admit something isn't working all conspire to keep weak projects on life support long past the point of useful return.

How comfortable is your organisation with managing uncertain innovation timelines?
By its nature, deep tech innovation does not run to a neat project plan. Scientific breakthroughs don't happen on schedule, and the most transformative ideas often take years longer than anyone initially expected. This question explores how comfortable your organisation is with that uncertainty when it comes to exploratory innovation.

How reliable are your financial/commercial/contract indicators for scale/pause/pivot decisions for innovation?
The speed of financial return varies dramatically depending on the type of innovation. An incremental process improvement might show ROI within months, while a deep tech platform could take a decade. If an organisation's financial indicators are only calibrated for the fast returns, they will consistently under-resource the longer-horizon work – not because they don't believe in it, but because the numbers never seem to justify it.

Cultural Index

How safe, psychologically, do members of your organisation feel about proposing new ideas or approaches?
Psychological safety is probably the most researched cultural variable in organisational behaviour, and perhaps the most underestimated blocker to innovation. When people don't feel safe to say something bold or unconventional, the ideas simply never surface. This question measures how well you feel your organisation has built that safety.

How willing are your employees to take risks?
Risk-taking in practice is very different from risk tolerance on paper. This question goes beyond whether the organisation says it values experimentation to explore whether you see employees around the business feeling empowered to try things that might not work out.

How much do other decision makers and leaders in your organisation exhibit curiosity and openness?
This question maps how you see the openness of the wider leadership coalition beyond yourself. Innovation rarely succeeds on the strength of a good idea alone. It also depends on the support of the leaders with the power to block it – heads of finance, operations, manufacturing, IT. If they never really get behind an idea and model openness and risk-taking themselves, a good idea will only get so far.

How much does a fear of cannibalisation impact innovation in your business?
When a new product or technology genuinely threatens an existing revenue stream, you might see quiet but persistent internal resistance that can be very hard to argue against directly. This question addresses how much that fear is actively shaping your innovation agenda.

How inclusive is your organisation to quieter contributors?
Innovation conversations can be dominated by the loudest, most confident voices – but some of the most valuable ideas come from people who would never put their hand up in a room full of senior leaders. This question tests whether you believe your organisation has genuinely built the structures and culture needed to bring quieter contributors into the conversation, or whether the innovation agenda is effectively a small club of the louder voices.

Structure and Process Index

To what degree does your business structure enable innovation?
Many organisations talk about innovation but have yet to build the infrastructure to support it in the form of dedicated teams, protected budget or formal processes. This question explores whether innovation is woven into how your business operates at a structural level.

How well does your organisation balance speed vs governance in terms of innovation?
Speed and governance are often in tension in large organisations. Governance is vital, but when it becomes the default answer to every new idea, it can effectively function as a veto. This question addresses whether your organisation has found a way to move fast on innovation without abandoning appropriate oversight, or whether the control instinct wins by default.

How effective is your organisation in preventing ideas from dying in bureaucracy?
'Death by committee' – when ideas go into a review process and simply never come out – is one of the oldest and most consistently reported innovation killers. This question quantifies how common that experience is, and how deliberately your organisation has designed its processes to prevent it.

Does the level of bureaucracy in your business stifle innovation?
Bureaucracy is used as a catch-all term for the processes, approvals and governance structures that can slow progress. This question explores how much those internal processes affect your organisation’s ability to innovate.

How good is cross-functional collaboration in your business?
Bringing new ideas to life typically requires collaboration across functions, from strategy and operations to technology, finance and delivery. This question explores how effectively you feel people in your organisation work together across organisational boundaries and whether knowledge, resources and decision-making flow freely between teams.

How closely does your company link innovation to performance?
Many organisations talk about the importance of innovation, but the real test is whether those expectations are reflected in objectives, incentives and leadership accountability. This question explores how closely innovation is connected to performance within your organisation, and whether people are encouraged to invest time and effort in new ideas alongside their day-to-day responsibilities.

External and Technical Index

How effective are you at monitoring emerging competitors?
Competitive disruption rarely announces itself. The organisations that get caught out are almost always the ones that were monitoring the wrong signals, tracking known competitors and missing the start-up or university spinout that was building something genuinely new from a completely different angle. This question asks you to look inward at your organisation to see if you’re looking in the right places for upcoming disruption.

How much do external factors constrain innovation?
External factors can have a significant influence on innovation, ranging from geopolitical developments and regulatory change to economic pressures and environmental challenges. Some evolve gradually and can be planned for, while others emerge unexpectedly and require rapid adaptation. This question explores the extent to which factors outside your organisation are affecting your ability to innovate.

How confident are you in your technical capabilities for future innovation?
This question explores how confident you are in your organisation's ability to develop and deliver future innovations using internal expertise, providing insight into how you approach collaboration and capability building.

How easily can your organisation integrate new tech with legacy systems?
Legacy system integration is one of the most cited and often underestimated barriers to innovation. An organisation can identify the right technology, build the right partnerships and secure the necessary investment, yet still struggle to realise value if existing systems and infrastructure cannot support adoption at scale.

How ready are you technically to adopt frontier tech, such as AI or automation?
There is an important distinction between being aware of frontier technologies and being ready to deploy them at scale. Many organisations have explored emerging technologies through pilots, proofs of concept or strategic discussions, but full-scale adoption requires much more than awareness and testers. This question explores how prepared you feel your organisation is to implement frontier technologies in practice, considering factors such as talent, infrastructure, governance and organisational readiness.