Your MVP is useless without innovation accounting – Innovation Book Series
Ask people in the startup or innovation community about Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup, and I bet “innovation accounting” won’t come up in 9 out of 10 of those conversations. Concepts such as minimum viable product (MVP) and pivoting have become firmly embedded in the startup lexicon thanks in part to Ries’ book. Innovation accounting has not. (According to Google AdWords, monthly search volume for “minimum viable product” is around 27x higher than for “innovation accounting.”) That’s unfortunate, because without it, Ries’ Build, Measure, Learn model falls apart. At best, measurement ends up being based largely on a few qualitative assessments that may not rigorously test your hypothesis. It’s also unfortunate because Ries’ innovation accounting methodology offers a simple, intuitive way of measuring learning within an active innovation project.
Innovation metrics: choose carefully to avoid being disrupted
With this blog post we launch an occasional series exploring what some of the best innovation books say about measuring and evaluating innovation. Since you’re reading this blog you are probably trying to figure out how to better measure your innovation efforts (either that or you’re a family member and here under duress). You may also be interested in exploring what some of innovation’s leading thinkers have said about evaluation, measurement, and innovation metrics. We’re starting this series to help directly answer that question (and, perhaps, save you some time).
So where to start? We thought Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma was a fairly obvious place to begin, and so did Google’s algorithms, so we must be right.