Reports & Research

Innovation Leader publishes in-depth quarterly special reports on a variety of topics.

Our latest reports are listed below. Reports are available for members only.

The Changing Landscape of Corporate-Startup Engagement

How are the interactions between Global 1000 companies and startups changing? How do large organizations build the case for greater involvement in the startup ecosystem? What resources do they put in place? To answer those questions, and others, we conducted a survey in Q3 2021 whose respondents included both leaders in large organizations and entrepreneurs who are seeking to collaborate with large organizations. Here’s the 61-page slide deck collecting what we found.

Design as a Competitive Advantage

More Research Reports

The New Imperatives: Innovation, Agility & Openness
For some, the period between March 2020 and March 2021 may have been a time in which innovation accelerated. But for other companies, spending a year or more in “fast twitch” responsive mode, versus planning for future growth, may have created an innovation deficit. Get data about how 250+ of your peers are responding.
Developing Innovation Metrics & Reports That Really Matter
To shed light on how large companies are creating metrics and reporting approaches that work well, we surveyed 196 professionals in large organizations in the first quarter of 2021.
Essential Data for Finishing 2020 Strong
What does the data show about how corporate innovation is changing? Innovation Leader’s editorial team shares data from four recent reports.
Benchmarking Innovation Initiatives in Financial Services
From late September through the end of October, we interviewed innovation leaders at 15 firms within the financial services ecosystem to benchmark their innovation and incubation activities.
Digitizing the Innovation Team
Get insights and recommendations for innovation leaders seeking to get the most out of digital tools, and also for tool developers seeking to build productive relationships with those leaders.
CxOs & Innovation
In April 2020, we began planning this research initiative, CxOs and Innovation. It will consist of two mini-reports, interviews with corporate leaders, and thought leadership essays by our sponsor, KPMG LLP. The objective: to be helpful to C-Suite leaders and those professionals responsible for driving innovation inside large organizations.
New Data About the Market for Innovation-Related Jobs
We asked 159 innovation professionals about the hiring happening in their organizations — or how long they’ve been hunting for a new role.
What the Future Looks Like
For our latest report, our team asked members of the innovation community and futurists to forecast what our “new normal” might be. Respondents discussed what aspects of life before the crisis they think will return, and which aspects of the world will be permanently altered.
State of Innovation 2020
As the coronavirus pandemic has led to shelter-in-place orders and sharply reduced economic activity, innovators are wondering about what the future could look like for their teams, organizations, and industries. To better understand what’s happening in corporate innovation and R&D right now, we fielded a survey from April 27-May 4, 2020.
Changing Culture in Large Organizations
In our view, fostering a culture that is supportive of innovation has never been more important than right now. 2020 will be a year of tremendous stress, pivots, and reprioritizing in every organization. Will your organization be able to source and act on the best ideas — ideas that may come from anyone? Test them fast enough? Get them deployed with help from colleagues who are working from home?
Quick Wins: Data and Case Studies on Delivering Results Fast
What role should quick wins play in your innovation or R&D portfolio? That’s the question we set out to answer with a survey and a set of qualitative interviews in our most recent research report.
How Innovation, R&D, and Strategy Executives Get Paid
If you’re doing innovation-related work in a large organization, how much should you be earning?
Benchmarking Innovation Impact 2020
Data, insights, and advice from more than 200 of your peers to help you overcome innovation challenges.
Startup Engagement: Best Practices for Large Organizations
Learn how some of the top-performing organizations in the world design strategies to engage with startups.
Co-Creation & Ecosystem Development
Get data from 275 innovation professionals on co-creation and ecosystem development.
Innovation & Risk
How well-aligned is your innovation group with colleagues in legal, compliance & security? Our 50-page report is packed with advice.
Best Innovation Coverage of 2018
We pulled data on the most popular reports, case studies & resources that our team produced in 2018. Get insights from our 12 top resources and another 15 from our partners.
Blueprints for Corporate Innovators
One of the big projects we’ve been working has been building tools, templates, and other resources to help people working on innovation in large organizations…
Benchmarking Innovation Impact 2018
Innovating inside large organizations is not easy. So how do you deliver concrete, tangible impact — over the short-term, medium-term, and long-term? Innovation Leader and KPMG have collaborated to create the go-to resource on corporate innovation, based on detailed survey data and interviews with senior executives at Whirlpool, Boeing, Johnson & Johnson, Southern Company, General Motors, and more.
Healthcare Innovation from the Leading Edge
Healthcare organizations are an extremely complex environments for innovation. Our report explores how healthcare companies have set up new initiatives that deliver results.
Scouting Trends & Emerging Tech
How do large companies scout the trends and technologies that will be most relevant to their future success? Ourreport collects advice from executives...
Governance, Reporting & Communications
This report collects the best insights from innovation execs at companies like Johnson & Johnson, ExxonMobil, and others, including recommendations from our members…
Innovation Teams & Business Units
Our report on building productive relationships between innovation groups and the business units includes insights and advice from AIG, Ralph Lauren, W.L. Gore and more.
How Much are Innovation Execs Paid?
We fielded a compensation survey that analyzed the base pay and bonuses of nearly 250 executives responsible for innovation at large corporations. Get data here…
Getting Connected Products Right
We surveyed companies active in, interested in, or developing connected products. Here’s the downloadable PDF report summarizing what we found.
Making Lean Startup Work
Our 83-page downloadable report is filled with advice, case studies, articles, interviews, and results from our recent survey of Innovation Leader members on lean startup deployment.
Innovation Software Survey Results: Who’s Using What?
We analyze the results of our Q1 survey of 115 innovation executives, which explored how they're using innovation software — and what software they're using...
Innovation Labs: Getting Started & Delivering Results
What exactly is an innovation lab? For our report on innovation labs, we talked to more than 20 executives at companies like Walmart, Home Depot, IKEA, and others.
How Innovation Teams Bring on Top Talent
This report explores how companies are getting the budget they need; describing the roles they’ve created; and more. It also includes more than 20 recent job descriptions.
Benchmarking Report 2015
We surveyed nearly 200 innovation leaders, and the result is Innovation Benchmarking Report 2015, a report that gives focus to data that can help solve innovators’ challenges. Download the 40-page study here…