1. Companies winning this award would need to demonstrate

• That they had a viable Corporate Innovation Plan which pulled all their major stakeholders into the innovation process.
• They had reached benchmark levels or targets relating to innovation. The precise targets would vary with the type of business. E.g. Manufacturing, financial services and retail businesses would clearly require different targets.

Changes in innovation performance could be highlighted and tracked using a series of Innovation Performance Ratios, analogous to Financial Performance Ratios. The ratios would be vetted by a trusted third party, for example Business Link and a global index figure, being a mean of all the relevant innovation ratios would be published in the annual report.

Some examples of innovation performance ratios:

Sales of new products/Total sales

R&D expenditure/Total sales

Number of innovation trained managers/Total number of staff

Number of staff suggestions discussed by management/              Number of innovation suggestions made by staff

Number of staff training days/ Total work days

Number of staff with CAD or other specialist IT experience/           Total number of staff

Companies would pay registration and examination fees to the awarding body, to finance the assessment costs. Fees could be set on a sliding scale related to turnover, in order to encourage SMEs to participate.