Innovation Metrics
Between September 2017 and March 2018, I led the co-creation of Strategyzer innovation metrics with Alex Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, and a consortium of three multinational companies and a SME with an ambitious innovation agenda.
Our client experience and research had confirmed the huge blind spot on measuring progress of innovation projects, and the many problems it creates in corporate innovation.
After 7 months of prototyping and extensive feedback from the companies involved in this co-creation project, we have landed on 4 simple innovation metrics. Those metrics enable organisations to keep track of:
TIME invested in new business idea,
COST of exploring the idea,
POTENTIAL in terms of expected financial return,
PROGRESS, also called de-risking, of the idea so far.
Those metrics work both at the level of a single project and a complete portfolio. It’s been hard work to keep things simple, especially for the PROGRESS metric, the one out of the four whose exact calculation process gave us the biggest headaches.
This working prototype of innovation metrics should already help companies answer some of the most pressing, and unresolved, questions in corporate innovation:
How do you measure progress (de-risking) on the journey from idea to a validated business case on an innovation project?
How do you know when to continue to fund an innovation project and when to kill it?
How do you measure how balanced an innovation portfolio is?
Strategyzer innovation metrics are now in the hands of the four participating companies and being used in their respective corporate innovation programmes. No doubt that many learnings, leading to more improvements of the framework, will come from their real-life experience.
Below you will find my favourite pictures from this breakthrough Strategyzer project on innovation metrics!
