INSPIRE Innovation Maturity Model
INSPIRE Innovation Maturity Model
Most organizations are not failing at innovation. They are early.
Innovation rarely dies from a shortage of ideas. It stalls because there is no shared picture of what mature innovation looks like — so effort scatters, good ideas lose momentum, and nobody can say whether things are improving.
The INSPIRE Innovation Maturity Model supplies that picture: how innovation capability actually develops, where organizations get stuck, and what turns scattered effort into something repeatable.
What the model measures
INSPIRE works on two dimensions. Capabilities is what an organization can actually do — the skills, structures and habits that let an idea survive contact with the business. Application is whether that capability is being used where it matters, or sitting idle in a lab, an offsite, or a slide.
Together they define seven levels of innovation maturity, from Inactive to Exceptional, describing how scattered experimentation becomes a system — and how it regresses when the conditions that supported it go away.
Why it stalls
Innovation depends on people being willing to say an unfinished idea out loud. That requires psychological safety, shared language, and leaders who model openness rather than certainty. Where those are missing, no process fixes it — which is why innovation programs often produce activity without producing change.
Where it comes from
INSPIRE is a synthesis rather than an adaptation: comparative study across established innovation maturity frameworks, distilled into plain language and structured for organizations that have to act rather than theorize.
The rest of the framework set
INSPIRE covers the capacity to innovate. The other two cover how organizations learn to think with AI, and how leaders work across the boundaries between groups.
Is innovation a capability here, or an event?
The difference usually shows up in what happens to an unfinished idea. That is a diagnosable condition, and the sequence of work follows from it.