Impact Innovation is an award-winning consulting firm that specialises in innovation and commercialisation. Established in 2006, Impact Innovation helps business innovators achieve a higher return on innovation investment by delivering new products and services to the market, creating new business models, designing effective innovation strategies and processes, upskilling innovation champions and supporting start-ups.

They support their clients in generating value through a range of services, tools, and expertise that cover innovation, commercialisation, and R&D strategy, design, implementation, and deployment. By leveraging its expertise in innovation and commercialisation, Impact Innovation has developed various tools and services to help its clients assess and enhance the commercial readiness of their products or services, such as the IC Readiness Tool.

The IC Readiness Tool aims to support start-up companies, research organisations and corporates to evaluate if a product or service they are developing is commercially ready. This tool assesses the developing product or service and then allocates a commercial readiness score. The scales are constructed so that a low score (i.e. ones and twos) indicates that the product or service has a lot of assumptions and unknowns, versus a high score (i.e. with eights and nines) which suggests there is a lot more certainty around the product/service. This tool provides businesses valuable insight into the status of their commercialisation project. It gives clear direction on the key actions that can be taken to improve the commercial readiness of the product or service.

The IC Readiness initiative has been successful, with a broad range of clients using the tool, from start-ups, research organisations, corporates, and government agencies. What started as a tool used to support Impact Innovation consulting activities has now evolved to support corporates seeking a greater return on investment from their portfolios of innovation initiatives.

For information about Impact Innovation, visit impactinnovation.com