Innovation capability during recession

A preview from the innovation survey by Capgemini Consulting, in conjunction with HSM, the sponsors of the World Innovation Forum, conducted over three hundred and seventy executives to explore the concept of innovation and to identify areas of commonality amongst them.
Innovation leaders stressed the importance of organizational factors in supporting innovation.
The challenge is in operationalizing and executing. Our respondents agree that while this is difficult, it is critical to long-term survival. Some have fundamentally restructured the way their organizations do business to support innovation; others propose new partnership models to support open source innovation and new approaches to the process of ideation and experimentation.
Our respondents consistently agreed that innovative companies are always looking outward, focusing on how to better serve their customers’ needs, including currently unmet and as yet unknown needs. New tools, technologies and media make it easier than ever to communicate with customers, and the most successful innovators are taking advantage of them to maintain meaningful customer conversations.
Innovators are also engaging customers earlier in the development process, shifting from a top-down research and development model to a bottom-up, decentralized model that takes advantage of customers’ first-hand insights to address their unmet needs.
One of the findings: Companies with higher innovation success rates are using the recession to transform their business rather than cutting back. In fact, one-third of respondents are actually using the slowdown as a catalyst to increase their efforts at innovation. (So far the preview.)

So how are you doning? If you what to do a quick check on your innovation capabilities use my 10 questions. (). Let me know what your findings from your response are.
If you are interested in a more in depth survey Innovation capability survey send me a mail.