How CViG Works?

Innovate, Measure and Succeed

The Competitive Value Innovation (CVI) Guide tool (CViG) starts from the premise that an organization’s innovation is determined and directed by you and your leadership colleagues. You drive the company day-by-day based on your beliefs and knowledge. The CViG captures this knowledge through a series of questions that address the essential aspects of corporate innovation management. As a result, you can make insightful decisions on what needs to be improved and what investments should the company make to achieve its stated goals in its own specific competitive context.

Smart investments can be made only by understanding the position of the company in a multi-dimensional competitive context:

Market Opportunities—size, dynamics, competition, etc.
Resource Capabilities—leadership, people, organization, culture, processes, facilities, tools, partners, etc.
Implementation Capabilities—management, development, speed, affordability, technology, production, suppliers, etc.
Solutions to the Market—products, services, their performance, affordability, delivery to market, customers’ support, etc.
Commercial Capabilities—channels, revenues, financials, etc.

The CViG on-line questionnaire is comprised of 5 sections:

Section A elicits information about the participating respondent and the participant’s knowledge about the company itself: e.g., its life cycle stage of evolution (start-up, growing, mature, or in decline) and the aspiration of its leadership concerning its fate. For example, is the company’s destiny to be a leader in its market segment (Built-to-Lead), to simply endure for “lifestyle satisfaction,” or to be sold to the highest bidder (Built-to-Flip)?
Section B of CViG gathers information about the company’s most important territorial markets: the primary, secondary, and tertiary.
Section C captures a detailed competitive analysis with respect to a specific competitor in one of the company’s targeted markets. This competitive analysis is performed across the five domains of competitiveness mentioned above.
Section D focuses on the key aspects of innovation management practices to date.
Section E investigates the participating manager’s perspective of the culture in the company and its collaboration practices

Answering the probing questions requires no preparation and takes about 35 minutes of an executive time. The result is a multi-dimensional corporate innovation assessment that reflects the executive mindset, the leadership alignment, its culture of innovation; its management processes, and includes a targeted competitive dashboard.

Individual Assessment: CViG as a “Mirror” of the Company in Participant’s Mind

A CEO, or any other company manager wishing to assess the innovation engagement of his/her company in a structured way, can use the Competitive Value Innovation Guide individually. To do so, a person registers as an individual to use the CViG on-line tool for a competitive corporate innovation assessment:

a simple quick assessment on a free basis or
a comprehensive assessment on fee-for-service basis. The fee, which can be adjusted based on discount codes, depends on the number of assessments in the individual subscription. The fee per assessment is much reduced depending on the number of assessments to be made.

Once registered, and the subscription is paid, the participant can start inputting data into the CVG online questionnaire. The participant can stop at any time, rest, do whatever else, and start later. There is no time limit. All individual assessment reports done over the subscription life are available to the subscribed individual.

A CViG report is available online instantaneously once the subscriber finishes answering the questions and pushes the “submit” button. The report is a mirror capturing the image of the company as perceived by the CVG subscriber. The more truthful the answers to the CVG questions, the more faithful to reality is the image in the CVG mirror…

Leadership Team Assessment – CViG as an Executive Misalignment Compass

The Competitive Value Innovation(CVI) guide (CViG) proves to be of even higher value for the company if it is used as a team tool by the entire leadership, starting with the team prime. This usually is the company CEO, the chief innovation officer (CINO), or the executive in charge of a division—i.e., business unit manager, etc.

The team prime must start the assessment process. She or he registers and subscribes for a “team assessment” by specifying how many people in the team will participate in the exercise as “team members” and how many assessments are planned within the present subscription. As is the case for individual assessments, the subscription fee depends on the number of assessments in the team subscription and the number of team participants. The fee per assessment is reduced depending on the number of assessments to be made and can be further reduced by discount codes. Only the team prime pays for the team assessment, and none of the team members are charged for their participation despite the fact that each one of them will get his/her own o individual report.

The team prime starts the process by performing his/her individual CViG assessment. In the process, the team prime selects the target market and the target competitor with regard to the competitive analysis that will be done by all participating team members. The team prime receives the usual individual assessment as described above.

The team prime notifies the team members of the need to do their own assessments using the “team code” provided by the CViG system. The team members receive their own individual CViG reports once they have answered the CViG questions. Of course, each team member can see only his/her own reports. Only the team prime can see reports other than his/her own.

In addition, the team prime has the valuable option of getting a comparative CViG reports of any two members of the team. This enables the team prime (only the team prime!) to obtain a much more detailed understanding of how the team members are considering the company and its management practices, thus revealing potential misalignments among the leadership of the “team”.

In addition, a comprehensive CVI assessment of the entire organization leadership can be obtained on request from c-IM&E Inc. Such a comprehensive leadership assessment report can be complemented by a presentation with proposals for enhancement of the company’s innovation management through a more appropriate system of management and associated training.

The organization leadership prime can also initiate the sharing of the company’s CVI reports with desired consultants or investors by asking the CViG system to send invitations with appropriate security codes for access. Naturally, neither the investor nor the consultants pay for the company’s use of the Competitive Value Innovation Guide.

Investors who are interested in using the CViG tool as part of their due diligence process and are registered as CViG users can initiate a company assessment by directing the CViG system to send an invitation for a Competitive Value Innovation Guide assessment to the company investment leader.

Large Scale Assessment – CViG as an Industry Sector / Regional Business Innovation Assessment Tool

The Competitive Value Innovation(CVI) guide (CViG) can be used in its wide survey mode by government, by industry associations, consultants and research institutions wanting to understand the competitiveness and innovation management issues of various industry sectors in their regional contexts in order to determine how to enhance more effectively economic performance and employment. The key players in industry- and region-wide assessments are the Survey Administrators and the Industry Executives participating in the survey.

The survey administrator registers and subscribes for a specific region/sector survey. The subscription fee depends on the number of participants envisaged and the actual number of completed surveys. Survey participants receive an invitation with a specific survey code, with which they register (at no cost!), perform their company’s diagnostics, and receive their online, confidential CViG reports for free.

The survey administrator can see the status of the survey (i.e., the number of completed individual diagnostics). The survey administrator can get an intelligent group assessment by instructing CViG and the designated c-IM&E consultant to perform a variety of analyses of the collected data using certain CViG survey filters. Notably, the survey administrator cannot see any specific individual corporate executive reports, which are available only to their respective owners. Undertaking CViG sectorial or regional industry surveys enables government agencies, research institutions, and industry associations to align their programs to real industry needs and provide effective support to increase industry performance and employment.