According to a McKinsey & Company study, more than 70% of senior executives said that innovation will be one of the top three drivers of growth for their companies.

Unfortunately, at the same time they also said they were “generally disappointed” in their ability to promote it—but they knew intuitively that any sustainable effort must be grounded by their company’s people and culture.

Years ago, a major U.S. consulting firm, Arthur Andersen, created a database of best practices for business activities. Later on, after this information and experience had seasoned through many years and possibly thousands of implementations, clients asked the firm if there were any fundamental lessons, or principles, that had emerged from the more than thirty-thousand pages of accumulated knowledge.

The response was, yes, there were three things that stood out: the most successful companies constantly search for a better way to do things, they develop deep relationships with stakeholders, and they adopt a strong process view of their businesses.

For simplicity, we distill those practices down to three core words: Proactive, Relationships and Processes.