Measuring it…
How innovative are we? Where are we on the innovation continuum? How is the pace of our progress? What are the gaps? A key role of an Innovation Leader is to stimulate innovation, including creating an innovation mindset. This can range from encouraging employees to experiment with innovative ideas to ensuring corporate leaders publicly celebrate innovations and recognize innovators.
Measuring all of this can be daunting. The easiest part is likely assessing corporate leadership behavior. It’s per definition qualitative: Innovation Leaders can directly observe how often corporate leaders mention “Innovation” in their speeches, support innovations, allocate resources, etc.
It’s more of a challenge to measure the mindset of thousands of employees. Regular surveys are a logical way. It can be done inexpensively, like with SurveyMonkey. Typical challenges are response rates and lack of historical data.
I was lucky that our company had an existing corporate-wide bi-annual “The Voice Survey”. All employees, across divisions and geographies, were asked to rate about 200 statements about the corporate culture (from strongly agree to strongly disagree). Around 25 statements were related to innovation/invention. In this section, about 10 questions were relevant for the commercial innovation I was focusing on, like “failure is accepted by your management” and “you feel confident that you can try new ways to solve problems”.
There were many benefits using this existing survey:
Data:
- historical data, which we could use to compare before, after and longitudinally (as the survey was already done multiple times before the innovation work formally started)
- cross divisional and cross country data, so again, to compare the results
- data from other large companies and industries who used the same survey, to provide a benchmark
Value:
- very high response rates: up to 90%, as managers were incentivized to get very high employee participation
- the survey provided good sensitivity, as I observed a clear correlation between positive innovation scores in countries where I was aware of very active local Innovation Leaders (and the other way around)
- the survey helped local, regional and global Innovation Leaders to identify specific innovation gaps in their geography
Resources:
- no additional cost
- no extra workload for employees
- available HR resources to analyze the data
As Peter Drucker said:
“What gets measured gets improved.”
So, as Innovation Leader, I measured the corporate innovation mindset by capitalizing on an existing survey, generating excellent data without additional resources.
More about this topic: Measuring Your Innovation Maturity, by Braden Kelley (InnovationExcellence)
Please share your thoughts or approach to measuring an innovation mindset below!
More of my blogs on innovation: Wim Vandenhouweele