Innovation Proficiency and Barriers to Its Development by Product Managers and Their Teams

Innovation proficiency is widely recognized as essential to organizational competitiveness; yet, how product managers and their teams develop these proficiencies across organizational contexts remains understudied. This study examines six innovation proficiencies—Customer Empathy, Insight Generation, Idea Generation, Idea Selection, Experimentation and Learning, and Mobilizing and Executing—using a longitudinal dataset of 15,842 survey responses collected across 1066 organizations over nine years (2016–2024). Responses were analyzed using descriptive statistics, nonparametric group comparisons, correlation analysis, reliability testing, longitudinal analysis, and systematic qualitative theme extraction from nearly 50,000 responses. Insight Generation is consistently the lowest-rated proficiency despite being ranked high in importance. Organization-weighted analysis finds significant, but modest, improvement in just one of the six proficiencies (Idea Selection) over the study period and positive but non-significant trends in the others. Qualitative analysis identifies customer centricity, lack of formalized processes and data-based decision making as persistent challenges over time. These findings suggest that improvement of innovation practices depends not only on Product Managers and their teams, but on organization-wide infrastructure changes to facilitate and support their innovation work.