Measured

Should we measure innovation?

An innovation is something that has never been done before. How do you measure something you don’t know yet? On the other hand, it’s unlikely that corporate leaders would pay us if we don’t accomplish anything.

I decided to put innovation metrics in place, but wanted to avoid measuring too much and rather invest most of my time in stimulating innovation. So I needed to find something in the middle.

The logical way was to go back to the two specific goals I got when I started in my Innovation Leader role:

• Across the organization, identify commercial innovations appropriate for global scaling
• Stimulate an innovation mindset, so more innovations emerge

… and to simply record progress of those two goals with innovation metrics.

To identify commercial innovations, an innovation portfolio helped to track the number of relevant-for-the-business innovations across four parts of an innovation funnel:

1. # of innovations in ideation stage (in this stage, innovations have a good hypothesis to address the business challenge)
2. # of innovations in feasibility stage (when a few key assumptions are being assessed qualitatively)
3. # of innovations in pilot stage (meaning testing key assumptions quantitatively)
4. # of innovations in scaling (using traditional metrics like number of countries that launched the innovation, number of customers reached, ROI, etc.)

This portfolio provided insights in how fast innovations move from one stage to another or how slow they move, so barriers for innovation could be identified and addressed.

To measure the impact of stimulating an innovation mindset, ten questions out of an annual company-wide survey served to track the perceptions on innovation with employees. These questions were the most relevant ones for commercial innovation, like: “Can I address business challenges in new ways?”, “Can I fail without penalty?”. It was surprising to see how fast perceptions changed in those regions with most active local innovation leaders! This made it possible to develop relevant targets.

As Peter Drucker said:

”What gets measured gets improved.”

So, as Innovation Leader, I aligned metrics with the 2 key goals I got from the commercial leadership and kept those metrics as simple as possible.

More reading: The Trouble with Measuring Innovation and The Structure and Measurement of Innovation

What are your thoughts? Please share/discuss below!