Gartner Research

3 Steps to Boost the Innovation Performance of R&D Teams

Published: 20 July 2023

Summary

Spurring innovation is key to creating long-term growth and sustaining a competitive advantage. But how this can be encouraged and incentivized is less clear. This research provides three steps for R&D leaders to create a nurturing environment to boost their teams’ innovation performance and output.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Gartner’s five markers of innovation potential are behavioral competency groupings that are indicative of an employees’ innovation performance. These are results seeking, customer empathy, idea integration, influencing and risk taking.

  • R&D project teams tend to be behaviorally homogeneous, meaning these five behavioral competencies are not always represented on teams. However, individuals’ innovation potential is higher when they work with a behaviorally diverse team.

  • Building an R&D environment that nurtures these five behaviors maximizes innovation performance.

Recommendations

To cultivate the innovation performance of the R&D workforce, R&D leaders must:

  • Build more behaviorally diverse project teams to boost their performance, but mitigate the

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