The Journey Towards Better Innovation Measurement

Many organizations aren’t satisfied with how they currently measure innovation performance (a recent survey of nearly 200 innovation professionals found that 54% described their approach to measuring innovation as still “taking shape”).

But improving innovation measurement systems can be daunting:

• The opportunity cost to spending time enhancing measurement practices seems high.
• It involves a lot of change (including change in how you measure success), which can be unsettling for teams and requires careful management.
• It’s rarely someone’s full-time job—so it has to be balanced with competing priorities.

As a result, many organizations that have successfully improved how they measure innovation performance have treated it as a journey—a set of cumulative, discrete steps taken over time.

Our guide sets out an ideal pathway for that journey. We describe the seven basic steps you can take, over time, to improve how your organization measures innovation. The steps are designed to address the most important aspects of innovation measurement first, and to cumulatively build capabilities and experience with different aspects of measurement.

The guide will help you:

• Establish where you currently are in the Journey.
• Identify where you should go next.
• Understand the benefits of moving to the next level.