Gartner Insights Abstract

3 CFO Lessons for Investing in Innovation

Published: 22 February 2024

Summary

While many organizations want to innovate effectively, most struggle to distill that ambition down into tangible actions and approaches required to make progress. To help, CFOs should understand and apply the key characteristics that set high-innovation-maturity organizations apart.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Gartner’s 2022 Justifying and Funding Innovation Survey revealed three primary differentiators of high-innovation-maturity organizations regarding investment strategy and posture.

  • High-innovation-maturity organizations view innovation as the critical driver of sustained competitive differentiation and a must-have element of their organizational culture, rather than as a tool to respond to external pressures or incrementally improve business operations.

  • Flexible investment governance is a key component of how high-maturity organizations manage innovation-focused investments. Across all innovation stages, high-maturity organizations are more likely than low-innovation-maturity organizations to use an adaptive governance style.

  • High-innovation-maturity organizations have a substantially higher appetite for innovation-related risk. Thirty-seven percent of high-maturity

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