"Digital transformation" gets used for almost anything with a screen in it, which is precisely the problem. Gartner's technology glossary keeps the three terms separate: digitisation is "the process of changing from analogue to digital form" — scanning a paper form, replacing a filing cabinet with a database — and by itself it changes nothing about how work gets done. Digitalisation is "the use of digital technologies to change a business model and provide new revenue and value-producing opportunities"; it takes digitised information and uses it to redesign a process or a customer interaction. Digital transformation is broader again: Gartner describes it as spanning anything from IT modernisation to digital optimisation to the invention of new digital business models, and other commentators, including the consultancy site i-SCOOP, frame it as the point at which digital capability reshapes strategy, structure and culture, not just a single process. The wording differs across sources, but the underlying logic is consistent: each term sits inside the next, and each one requires a bigger organisational commitment than the one before it.

The conflation matters because it lets programmes claim a transformation while only ever doing digitisation. A business that scans its invoices has digitised a process; it has not become a digitally capable competitor, and treating the two as equivalent is a common reason transformation programmes are declared "done" long before they have changed anything that matters to a customer or a balance sheet. Scoping a programme honestly starts with naming, in plain terms, which of the three you are actually attempting.

Innovation is often described as if it were luck: an inspired idea, a breakthrough, a eureka moment. Tidd and Bessant's Managing Innovation (7th edition) argues the opposite — that innovation is a process that can be managed deliberately, built around four linked activities: searching the internal and external environment for opportunities and threats; selecting, from everything found, which opportunities are worth committing scarce resources to, consistent with the organisation's overall strategy; implementing, turning a selected idea into a working reality through to launch; and capturing the value created, so the organisation (and not just a competitor who copies the idea) benefits from it, and so what was learned feeds back into the next cycle of searching.

Framed this way, the model does two useful things. First, it turns "we're not very innovative" into a diagnosable question — which of the four stages is actually failing? Second, it explains a frequently reported pattern that Tidd and Bessant discuss: organisations that are confident, even prolific, at search (there is rarely a shortage of raised hands and suggestion schemes) turn out to be far weaker at selection, because choosing means saying no to most ideas and committing real budget and senior attention to the few that remain — a harder, more political task than generating ideas in the first place. A business can look busy with innovation activity while its selection and resourcing discipline is the actual constraint.

Knowing an organisation needs to change is not the same as knowing how far it has to go, or in which direction. Digital maturity models exist to answer that second question by assessing capability against defined stages rather than a single, instinctive score. One of the most widely cited studies, Kane, Palmer, Phillips, Kiron and Buckley's 2015 MIT Sloan Management Review/Deloitte research, found that the clearest difference between digitally mature organisations and the rest was not their technology spend but the clarity of their digital strategy and their willingness to take managed risks — a finding consistent with how many maturity frameworks are built: strategy and leadership as one dimension, sitting alongside technology and data, customer experience, and culture, rather than treating "digital" as a single technology score.

This matters practically because an aggregate maturity figure can hide exactly where the problem is. Two organisations can score the same overall and need completely different interventions — one weak on technology and strong on culture, the other the reverse. A usable maturity assessment has to be broken down by dimension, not just reported as one number, or it tells you how far behind you are without telling you where to start.

A culture can say it values innovation and still punish, in practice, almost everything innovation requires: raising an awkward idea, admitting a pilot failed, or spending time on something with no guaranteed payoff. Building on Edgar Schein's (1985) distinction between an organisation's espoused values — what leaders say they believe — and the underlying assumptions that actually drive behaviour, the gap is often summarised as espoused versus enacted values: what actually gets rewarded, resourced and tolerated day to day. That gap is a useful test for innovation culture specifically: a wall poster about "embracing failure" means little if the budget and performance-review process still punish the first failed pilot.

Tidd and Bessant describe organisations that sustain innovation over time as sharing a recognisable set of traits rather than any one practice: a shared sense of direction from leadership about why innovation matters, structures and ways of working that let ideas move between functions instead of dying in one department, and — closely related to Amabile, Conti, Coon, Lazenby and Herron's (1996) research on the organisational climate for creativity — an environment where people feel genuinely supported in proposing and testing ideas, not merely permitted to in theory. That research, including the KEYS instrument for assessing a creative climate, found that perceived support from managers and colleagues, autonomy over how work gets done, and the resources and time to pursue an idea are what predict whether people actually behave innovatively. Diagnosing a culture for innovation, in other words, means looking at behaviour and resourcing, not at the values statement.