Calling your company a leader in new ideas does not tell you whether anyone has changed how they work. Research on innovation measurement in South Africa found that respondents struggled to connect standard questionnaires with their own sectors and circumstances, creating risks of misunderstanding and measurement error (research on contextualizing innovation surveys). A confident answer can still be an unclear answer.

Innovation is only visible when you ask about specific behavior. A team can generate plenty of ideas while struggling to test customer demand, secure resources, collaborate across departments, or implement anything meaningful. Asking employees whether leadership supports innovation won't reveal which of those stages needs attention.

Start with a practical diagnostic. Identify where work stops progressing, then choose innovation survey questions that help you decide what to change.

• Culture and participation: Can people challenge assumptions and propose unfamiliar approaches?
• Customer evidence and idea quality: Are teams solving a real problem with a distinctive, useful concept?
• Implementation and outcomes: Can teams move beyond approval and demonstrate a worthwhile result?

Match the respondent to the decision. Customers can describe their problems and reactions; employees can describe working conditions; project owners can report implementation progress. Don't ask any group to guess what another group knows.

When you find marketing research findings, separate reported opinions from evidence of behavior. The question families below serve different stages of an innovation journey. The suggested adaptations are practical prompts, not substitutes for the official versions of named research instruments.

Table of Contents

• 1. Sean Ellis Product-Market Fit Question
  • Use disappointment to investigate dependence
• 2. Kano Model Functional/Dysfunctional Questions
  • Separate expectations from differentiators
• 3. Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter
  • Establish the offer before collecting prices
• 4. Purchase Intent Concept Test Question
  • Ask what would prevent adoption
• 5. KEYS Assessing the Climate for Creativity
  • Separate encouragement from practical support
• 6. Team Psychological Safety Survey (Edmondson Scale)
  • Ask about the response to interpersonal risk
• 7. Community Innovation Survey (Oslo Manual Framework)
  • Build an implementation record
• 8. The Mom Test Customer Discovery Questions
  • Collect episodes rather than compliments
• 9. Idea Novelty and Usefulness Rating
  • Define the comparison before scoring
• 10. Doblin's Ten Types of Innovation Diagnostic
  • Look beyond the deliverable
• 10 Innovation Survey Questions: Comparison Guide
• Turn Survey Findings Into Better Innovation Decisions
  • Turn a finding into an operating change
  • Keep the creative follow-through focused

1. Sean Ellis Product-Market Fit Question

Suggested question: How would you feel if you could no longer use this product?

Use this question when people have enough experience with a product to describe what they'd lose. Offer responses such as very disappointed, somewhat disappointed, not disappointed, and no longer using it, followed by a request to explain their answer.

Use disappointment to investigate dependence

Consider a product team evaluating a shared campaign-approval workspace. An agency account manager might miss its client feedback history, while a designer might barely notice its absence. Keep those responses separate rather than treating everyone as the same customer.

Add follow-ups that make the answer useful:

• Value: What would you miss most?
• Replacement: What would you use instead?
• Experience: Which task did you last complete with the product?

Use the language customers provide to write a clearer value proposition. Then compare that promise with what the product actually helps people accomplish.

The decision is whether to deepen value for a specific audience or broaden acquisition. Strong disappointment within a relevant segment is a reason to investigate that segment, not automatic permission to increase marketing spending. Existing users also can't explain why other buyers never adopted the product.

For SaaS leaders, the agency guide for SaaS executives provides a related product-marketing resource. Keep your survey interpretation grounded in your own users, their alternatives, and the reasons behind their answers rather than assuming a universal pass mark.

2. Kano Model Functional/Dysfunctional Questions

A customer can want a feature without considering it a reason to choose your product. To explore that distinction, ask about both its presence and its absence.

Suggested pair: How would you feel if this feature were available? How would you feel if it weren't available?

Describe the same feature in both questions. Keep the language neutral, and provide response options that distinguish liking it, expecting it, accepting it, feeling indifferent, and disliking it.

Separate expectations from differentiators

For an agency portal, test client approval history separately from automated creative suggestions. A client might expect a reliable approval record but have mixed feelings about receiving machine-generated recommendations.

Use the paired responses to investigate different reactions:

• Expected capability: Customers object to its absence but aren't excited by its presence.
• Potential differentiator: Customers welcome its presence but can tolerate its absence.
• Unwanted complexity: Customers prefer the experience without it.

Use this approach before roadmap prioritization, especially when stakeholders disagree about whether a feature is essential or merely appealing. Adapt the feature description to the respondent's role, but don't change the underlying capability between audiences.

The limitation is context. A short feature description doesn't reproduce the experience of using it, and respondents may interpret unfamiliar capabilities differently. Treat these patterns as prioritization hypotheses, not formal Kano classifications unless you're using the complete method and its interpretation rules.

The decision should be concrete: fix a baseline capability, prototype a possible differentiator, or remove an unnecessary complication.

3. Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter

Pricing questions belong after respondents understand the offer. Asking about price while the product's scope remains vague leaves you interpreting answers to different imagined products.

For a price-perception exercise, describe the package, buyer, billing basis, and included support before asking respondents where the offer feels suspiciously cheap, good value, expensive but worth considering, or too expensive.

Establish the offer before collecting prices

Suppose an agency is developing a recurring brand-monitoring service. Specify whether the package includes reporting alone or also interpretation, recommendations, and client presentations. Otherwise, a respondent evaluating a dashboard and another evaluating strategic support aren't judging the same offer.

• Choose the respondent: Recruit people who influence the relevant purchasing decision.
• Clarify the unit: State whether the price applies to an account, project, subscription, or service package.
• Request context: Ask which current alternative or budget informed the answer.

Use the results to choose pricing hypotheses for further testing. Don't present a price-perception range as proof of the price that will produce the best commercial outcome.

A buyer's stated comfort with a price isn't the same as a commitment to purchase at that price.

For teams discussing this approach, the accompanying video can serve as a workshop resource.

Adapt the exercise carefully for unfamiliar categories. If respondents can't explain what they're buying or compare it with an existing solution, return to concept clarification before interpreting their price answers.

4. Purchase Intent Concept Test Question

Suggested question: Based on this description, how likely would you be to buy or use this offer?

Use clearly labeled responses ranging from definite rejection to definite interest, with room for uncertainty. State the price, relevant conditions, and expected use case so respondents aren't evaluating an attractive idea without its trade-offs.

A brand agency could use this question to compare proposed service packages. A product team could use it to screen a new workflow before committing to development.

Ask what would prevent adoption

Interest alone doesn't explain what to build next. Pair the question with a request to identify the main reason for the answer and the biggest obstacle to adoption.

• Customer problem: What would this help you accomplish?
• Switching requirement: What would you need to stop using or doing?
• Purchase barrier: What would prevent you from choosing it?
• Missing information: What else would you need to know?

Keep presentation quality comparable across concepts. Don't compare a polished visual prototype with a rough paragraph and assume respondents are reacting only to the underlying ideas.

Use concept-testing methods to connect the survey with interviews, prototypes, or other evidence. The decision is which concept deserves further investigation, not which concept is guaranteed to succeed.

Interpret answers within the audience you recruited. Enthusiasm from people who don't face the problem or control the budget shouldn't outweigh specific objections from intended buyers. If respondents like the promise but can't identify a realistic occasion to use it, clarify the use case before commissioning more design work.

5. KEYS Assessing the Climate for Creativity

When employees have ideas but can't pursue them, ask about working conditions rather than demanding more creativity.

For a practical climate pulse inspired by this topic, ask employees to assess whether they can explore alternatives, access relevant expertise, obtain resources, and understand how proposals are evaluated. Don't describe a homemade questionnaire as the official KEYS assessment.

Separate encouragement from practical support

An agency's leaders might welcome ambitious campaign concepts while scheduling every available hour against client delivery. Ask about both the encouragement and the opportunity to act.

Useful prompts include:

• Freedom: Can you explore a different approach when the brief allows it?
• Resources: What prevented you from testing a recent idea?
• Manager response: What happened when you last proposed changing an established approach?
• Collaboration: Could you access the expertise needed to develop the idea?

Administer the survey privately and explain how responses will be summarized. Avoid sharing role-level breakdowns when colleagues could infer who supplied a critical comment.

Use the findings to change operating conditions. If employees understand the goal but lack access to specialists, arrange that access. If proposals stall because nobody knows who can approve them, clarify decision rights rather than scheduling another brainstorming session.

The limitation is that employees are reporting their experience, not providing an independent assessment of every constraint. Follow up with a review of a recent project and compare the reported obstacle with what happened.

For a formal assessment or external comparison, use the appropriate instrument and administration guidance. For an internal pulse, keep the questions tightly connected to decisions you can make.

6. Team Psychological Safety Survey (Edmondson Scale)

People can attend every brainstorming session and still withhold their most useful objections. Participation counts won't tell you whether they feel comfortable challenging a senior colleague.

PwC's survey found that only 56% felt safe trying new approaches, while 54% said their team treated failures as learning opportunities (PwC workforce survey findings). Those are different conditions, and your questions should distinguish them.

Ask about the response to interpersonal risk

For a custom pulse, ask whether respondents raised a concern, requested help, or suggested an unfamiliar approach during the observation period. Then ask what happened afterward.

A useful scenario is a creative review where a junior strategist questions the client's preferred direction. Did colleagues examine the evidence, dismiss the person, or avoid the disagreement?

Practical rule: Don't promise anonymity unless your collection and reporting process can actually protect it.

Use the official Edmondson instrument if you need results from that named scale. Behavior-based prompts you write yourself should remain clearly labeled as a separate exercise.

The decision is how to change team interactions. Leaders might invite written input before discussion, explain why they rejected an idea, or examine an unsuccessful experiment without assigning personal blame.

Guidance on creating psychological safety can help translate the findings into facilitation choices. Don't mistake a positive survey response for proof that everyone feels safe, particularly if only the most comfortable employees participated.

7. Community Innovation Survey (Oslo Manual Framework)

Suggested screening question: During the observation period, did your organization introduce a new or significantly improved product, service, or business process?

The Community Innovation Survey organizes measurement around innovation introductions, activities, thematic issues, and firm characteristics. It also captures collaboration, information sources, effects, and barriers rather than relying on a broad self-assessment (Community Innovation Survey questionnaire architecture).

Build an implementation record

For an internal version, ask a project owner to describe a specific change before answering follow-ups. An agency might identify a new client-onboarding process; a product team might identify a changed customer-facing service.

Separate the record into clear categories:

• Activity: What research, experimentation, or development took place?
• Implementation: What changed in actual use?
• Collaboration: Which internal teams or external partners contributed?
• Status: Was the work introduced, still underway, paused, or abandoned?
• Outcome: What evidence supports its reported effect?

This distinction matters because running an experiment isn't the same as implementing a change. Likewise, implementing something doesn't establish that it delivered a worthwhile outcome.

Use this approach for portfolio reviews and organizational audits. Ask accountable owners to complete it, then resolve duplicate submissions when several departments describe the same project.

Adapt the examples to your context without changing the definition between teams. For an agency, include service delivery and client experience, not just new campaign concepts.

The limitation is reporting consistency. A department-level adaptation isn't automatically comparable with a national business survey. Use it to understand your own portfolio unless the population, definitions, and administration support a broader comparison.

8. The Mom Test Customer Discovery Questions

Before asking whether someone likes your idea, ask them to describe the problem as they last experienced it.

Suggested prompt: Describe the last time you encountered this problem. What did you do?

Follow with questions about the workaround, people involved, consequences, and any effort spent resolving it. These are practical discovery prompts, not quotations from a published instrument.

Collect episodes rather than compliments

Suppose a design team is exploring a new feedback-management tool. Instead of asking whether clients want simpler reviews, ask a client to walk through the last approval that became difficult.

Useful follow-ups include:

• Sequence: What happened before the delay?
• Workaround: How did you keep the project moving?
• Consequence: What became harder because of the problem?
• Ownership: Who decided whether to change the process?

Use interviews when you need to investigate unexpected answers. A written survey is more suitable when respondents already understand the topic and can describe an experience without extensive prompting.

For practical preparation, combine guidance on how to gather customer feedback with a resource on how to run discovery interviews.

The decision is whether the problem deserves further exploration. Don't convert a vivid story into a claim that the whole market shares the same difficulty.

Recruit beyond friendly clients and internal advocates. Keep customer descriptions separate from your interpretation, and record what remains uncertain. If respondents repeatedly describe different problems, narrow the audience or problem statement before asking them to evaluate a proposed solution.

9. Idea Novelty and Usefulness Rating

A concept can be unusual without being valuable. It can also be useful without giving customers a reason to choose it over an existing alternative.

Ask evaluators to assess novelty and usefulness separately, then explain the evidence behind each judgment. Keep feasibility separate too, so an operational concern doesn't disappear inside a vague usefulness score.

Define the comparison before scoring

For a campaign review, novelty might mean distinctiveness relative to the client's recent work and direct competitors. Usefulness might mean how clearly the concept addresses the audience problem and communication objective.

Give reviewers the same brief, concept description, and evaluation criteria. Ask them to submit their initial assessments independently before discussing the shortlist.

• Novelty prompt: What is meaningfully different about this idea?
• Usefulness prompt: Which audience need or strategic objective does it address?
• Evidence prompt: What supports that judgment?
• Feasibility prompt: What would we need to learn before producing it?

This approach fits the broader measurement principle of distinguishing what is new to an organization from what is new to its market (OECD innovation measurement guidance).

Use the ratings to choose the next test, not to manufacture agreement. A distinctive concept with uncertain usefulness may need customer research; a useful but familiar concept may need further creative development.

Connect the shortlist to an idea-validation process. The limitation is evaluator judgment: colleagues may disagree because they use different comparisons or know different things. Preserve the reasons for disagreement instead of hiding them inside an average.

10. Doblin's Ten Types of Innovation Diagnostic

When every innovation proposal involves a new product feature, broaden the questions.

Use Doblin's named framework as a prompt for reviewing opportunities across the business, while keeping any custom survey distinct from a formal diagnostic. For each area you examine, ask what changed, what evidence exists, and what opportunity deserves investigation.

Look beyond the deliverable

An agency could examine its commercial arrangement, partner relationships, internal processes, service experience, distribution channels, and customer engagement. The useful question isn't whether each area deserves a high score, but whether a specific change could address an important problem.

Invite strategists, account leads, creatives, delivery specialists, and commercial decision-makers to contribute. Ask each person to distinguish direct knowledge from speculation.

• Current activity: What have we changed in this area?
• Unmet need: What customer or operational problem remains?
• Potential: Why might a different approach matter?
• Dependency: Who would need to collaborate?
• Next step: What evidence would justify an experiment?

For example, a brand agency might investigate whether a revised client-service experience would be more valuable than another addition to its deliverable list. That's a proposed investigation, not a claim that the change will succeed.

Use this diagnostic during portfolio planning, especially when the team keeps proposing similar projects. A low-activity area isn't automatically underinvested; it may be irrelevant to the strategy or constrained for a good reason.

Choose opportunities based on a clear problem, a plausible benefit, and an achievable learning step rather than trying to innovate everywhere.

10 Innovation Survey Questions: Comparison Guide

Method	🔄 Implementation complexity & resources	📊 Expected outcome	💡 Ideal use	⭐ Key advantage
Sean Ellis Product-Market Fit Question	Low; one question for active users; ⚡ quick to deploy	Share of users who would be very disappointed without the product	Assess product-market fit and readiness to scale	Simple benchmark for a broad traction signal
Kano Model Functional/Dysfunctional Questions	Medium; paired questions for each feature; moderate survey and analysis effort	Feature categories: must-be, performance, delighter, and others	Prioritize product features and balance basics with differentiators	Shows which features satisfy expectations or create delight
Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter	Medium; four price questions and curve analysis	Acceptable price range and key price-perception points	Test pricing for concepts or products before launch	Reveals a range of acceptable prices without needing an existing benchmark
Purchase Intent Concept Test Question	Low; short survey and simple scoring; ⚡ fast and inexpensive	Top-box or top-two-box purchase-intent scores	Screen or compare product, packaging, or campaign concepts	Enables quick, consistent comparisons across concepts
KEYS: Assessing the Climate for Creativity	High; multidimensional employee survey and contextual analysis	Organizational strengths and barriers affecting creativity	Diagnose and track workplace conditions that support innovation	Research-backed detail on specific cultural levers
Team Psychological Safety Survey (Edmondson Scale)	Low to medium; seven items; requires anonymity and thoughtful follow-up	Team-level signal of comfort with interpersonal risk-taking	Identify barriers to speaking up, learning, or brainstorming	Short, validated measure linked to team learning and innovation
Community Innovation Survey (Oslo Manual Framework)	High; detailed firm-level survey and reporting	Standardized view of innovation activity, collaboration, and barriers	Benchmark innovation across organizations, sectors, or regions	Broad, internationally comparable coverage beyond R&D
The Mom Test Customer Discovery Questions	Medium; skilled interviews and synthesis require time	Evidence about past behavior, real problems, and workarounds	Validate customer problems before developing solutions	Reduces misleading feedback from hypothetical or leading questions
Idea Novelty and Usefulness Rating	Low; brief post-session scoring and light analysis; ⚡ quick	Ranked ideas balancing originality with practical value	Shortlist ideas after brainstorming or concept generation	Creates a shared way to compare creativity and feasibility
Doblin's Ten Types of Innovation Diagnostic	Medium; cross-functional scoring and interpretation	Innovation activity gaps across ten areas	Broaden opportunity discovery beyond products and features	Highlights overlooked innovation opportunities across the business

Turn Survey Findings Into Better Innovation Decisions

Don't treat innovation survey results as a scorecard to display and forget. Choose a small set of findings, explain what they suggest, assign an owner, and schedule a follow-up check. Keep the distinction between what respondents said, what you infer, and what you'll do visible.

Start by checking whether the answers are interpretable. Did respondents understand the question, have access to the information, and answer about the same period? The Oslo Manual recommends explicit observation periods, consistent definitions, and simple questions, while recognizing that wording, filtering, and collection methods can influence results (Oslo Manual survey-design guidance).

Turn a finding into an operating change

A useful action record should explain the finding without overstating it. If employees report difficulty obtaining approval, that suggests an approval problem to investigate, not proof that leadership opposes innovation.

• Finding: Describe the response pattern and relevant comments.
• Interpretation: State the likely explanation and what remains uncertain.
• Action: Name the process, resource, or behavior you'll change.
• Owner: Assign someone with authority to carry it out.
• Follow-up: Specify what evidence you'll review after the change.

For example, an agency might find that creatives can propose ideas but struggle to involve account leads before client presentations. The response could be an earlier cross-functional review with a clear decision owner, rather than another open-ended ideation workshop.

A product team might find strong concept interest but weak evidence of an existing customer problem. Its next step should be discovery interviews or a realistic prototype test, not a confident launch forecast.

Measure the constraint you changed. Don't claim the whole innovation system improved because a single survey response became more positive.

Keep the creative follow-through focused

For campaign, messaging, and brand work, turn survey evidence into a precise creative brief. Replace a broad request for fresh ideas with the audience problem, observed behavior, practical constraints, and learning objective.

Bulby can support that next step through a structured, collaborative brainstorming process. Teams can use its guided exercises to develop focused concepts from research findings while bringing strategists, creatives, and account teams into the work.

Keep evaluation separate from generation. First develop possible responses to the finding, then assess their relevance, distinctiveness, and testability. Repeat the relevant innovation survey questions after people have experienced the change, and compare their answers with project records or customer evidence before deciding what to expand.

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Bulby offers AI-powered guidance and structured brainstorming exercises for developing campaign concepts, messaging angles, and brand ideas. Visit Bulby to turn a specific survey finding into a collaborative creative session, then select focused concepts your team can test.