I wanted to highlight some work with one of our partners innovator Soren Kaplan. In the months ahead we are going to be sharing more information on LeapFrogging. Soren has written an award-winning and bestselling book that shows how any organization or internal business function can “change the game.”
That’s exactly what Innovationedge and Soren will be doing in our partnership to deliver the tools to help business leaders embrace uncertainty, rather than avoid it! We’ll be helping clients create new products, services and business models.
This month Soren is our guest writer, and he has penned a brilliant article (originally posted over at Innovation Excellence). Here is a sampling of that piece:
How do you measure innovation?
By Soren Kaplan
Because innovation is now a widely recognized critical requirement for virtually all companies across all industries, the metrics imperative is here. Leaders must establish a new breed of metrics that move beyond conventional measures and that:
- Create an organizational culture that supports and drives strategic innovation
- Establish critical capabilities tuned to the evolving competitive business landscape
- Evaluate innovation efforts to ensure both return on investment and support feedback loops of learning and improvement
- Drive profitable growth
A Framework for Innovation Metrics
The best solutions create simplicity from complexity. Assuming that successful innovation results from the synergies between complementary success factors, it is important to address these by:
- Creating a “family of metrics” for ensuring a well-rounded portfolio of measures
- Including both “input metrics” and “output metrics” to ensure measures that drive resource allocation and capability building, as well as return on investment
A “family of metrics” ensures a portfolio of measures that cover the most important innovation drivers. The following are the three categories to consider for any metrics portfolio:
Return on Investment Metrics
ROI metrics address two measures: resource investments and financial returns. ROI metrics give innovation management fiscal discipline and help justify and recognize the value of strategic initiatives, programs and the overall investment in innovation.
Organizational Capability Metrics
Organizational capability metrics focus on the infrastructure and process of innovation. Capability measures provide focus for initiatives geared toward building repeatable and sustainable approaches to invention and re-invention.
Leadership Metrics
Leadership metrics address the behaviors that senior managers and leaders must exhibit to support a culture of innovation within the organization, including the support of specific growth initiatives.
Within each of these categories, there are “input metrics” and “output metrics.” Input metrics are the investments, resources and behaviors that are necessary to drive results. Output metrics represent the desired results for the metric category.