Peter Drucker wrote that “businesspeople stand on the threshold of the knowledge society”. He believed in 2001 that a company’s competitive advantage derives from a long under-developed asset – its capability and capacity to generate and apply insights and judgements to innovation.

Innovation is most often not about new new; it’s about the reapplication of existing ideas in new contexts. It is also about small developments, changing the little things, as well as big statement product or service launches.

Some of the most successful organisations of this time – from Google to Apple or P&G to Intuit – have got at least one thing in common. They have fully embraced a culture of democratised access to research, insight and evidence and understand the value of its application.

Timeline, Facebook’s redesigned homepage that helped significantly fuel its continued success, and the Like button started as Hackathon ideas. Both demonstrate how powerful it can be to unshackle the innovation and insight-generation power of the whole business – by not simply relying on a small department of evidence creators, curators, and gatekeepers.

Making evidence-generation and the application of insights part of everyday business as usual – a habitual not circumstantial behaviour – can drive significant and long-lasting commercial advantage.

Spotlight: P&G

Under the leadership of A.G. Lafley, P&G saw a period of unrivalled commercial success in the early 2000s – beginning a fundamental pivot with regard to the responsibility for generating strategic insights. At the centre of this was the belief that insights should be democratised across the organisation, not cocooned within organisational silos or departments.

Enabling and empowering the generation, identification and activation of insights became one of P&G’s fundamental pillars of commercial success. Not only was the insight-driven approach promoted, it was fueled through investment in training to develop and foster a corporate culture, insight-based decision-making at the heart of P&G’s DNA.

Join our Intelligence Capital webinar on Thursday 21 May at 11am.

Attend this joint Savanta / MRS webinar to view the practitioner’s guide to Intelligence Capital™, with case studies from across our industry and speakers from BT and Google. We also provide a number of tools which can be used to help you along the way.