We are proud to announce that the Aii team has received the Best Practitioner Award at the Frontiers in Service conference for their presentation of The American Innovation Index™ (Aii).
The American Innovation Index (Aii) is an ambitious project to rate and rank U.S. companies across a variety of sectors based on their level of innovativeness, as viewed through the eyes of their customers. The study examines how consumers experience innovation from the leading companies they do business with, including how the companies interact with customers and their perceived social innovativeness. Innovativeness is an important feature for companies to address in their strategy because it correlates with loyalty, differentiates them from competition and drives growth. Indeed, a company may actually invest too much in ensuring high satisfaction and not enough in new and innovative ways of meeting customer needs. Social innovation is also an area of emerging importance in a business environment where consumers (particularly Millennials) expect companies to broaden their focus to solve social and environmental problems.
The presentation introduces the project and describes insights from the 2018 baseline Aii (expected to be released in the second quarter). The Aii is conducted by Illuminas, a market research firm that specializes in services and technology, in partnership with the Social Innovation Collaboratory at Fordham University and the Center for Innovation at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). The study is based on the methodology of the Norwegian Innovation Index (NII), with the inclusion of additional metrics to capture social innovation. NHH is recruiting partners around the world to conduct local innovation index tracking studies, so that ultimately comparisons can be made across markets.
This project is unique in its scope. Most innovation listings of companies in the U.S. rely on financial metrics or “upstream” features such as R&D and technology investments. Using the NII methodology, the Aii relies on “downstream” results, that is, what customers actually experience from service providers when they do business after innovation investments have had an impact. In addition, many innovation indexes rank countries instead of companies, usually based on macroeconomic measures. The true measure of innovativeness of a country is how its consumers perceive the companies they rely on for services and products.
You can view the award-winning presentation here.