Every year, IdeaScale asks our customers what their main priorities are for the coming year, and without fail one of the top two priorities is to create a culture of innovation. Every innovation thought leader, every organizational engagement specialist, every pundit or leader in transformation says that this is the secret to avoiding disruption.
Crowdsourcing and open innovation initiatives are vital by bringing vast stakeholders together to share ideas on complex problems and opportunities. Much of the focus is set on engaging the crowd yet deciding which ideas to take a risk on requires data on the likely impacts and costs.
In this series I’ve been critically examining the significant changes impacting the corporate innovation competency, which leads to how organisations drive future growth and impact.
What gets measured gets managed. Innovation is not serendipity; it’s a managed process of transforming novel ideas to achieve their business value. You can only manage what you measure.
The right innovation metrics and indicators are often difficult to find and apply. Not many CEOs would be able to show innovation dashboards with 3-5 simple KPIs.
I’ve recently been advising a range of leaders in how to start successful innovation programs. A couple are relaunches of efforts that were abandoned in the past, and others are starting from scratch in organizations (and sectors) that are more comfortable with the status quo.
Last year, one of the most popular topics at the annual Open Nation innovation conference was metrics. How do you measure your innovation capabilities? How do you track your results from established programs?
It isn’t exactly easy to succeed in innovation. The vast majority of innovation attempts seem to fail and a mere 6% of executives are satisfied in their innovation performance, despite innovation generally being considered as very important for the future of their organization.
Measuring innovation is one of the most ambiguous tasks when engaging in innovation management. Because of the complex nature of innovation, finding the right metrics is far from being simple.
Imagine a world where customer service, procurement, marketing, finance, operations, human resources, and sales can truly help each other and work together, instead of stepping on each others’ toes and pointing fingers. A world where all parts of the organizations work together with a shared sense of purpose, no matter how different their cultures, processes, and systems, have been in the past.
In an Innovation Point article, Founder Soren Kaplan notes that only one third of Fortune 1000 companies have defined innovation metrics. And yet 77% of business leaders see innovation as a priority. How is it possible that something that is so important to business leaders doesn’t have a defined set of KPIs?
The legacy approach to talent selection involves matching education, length of experience and functional skills to the role. All of this makes sense as a baseline, and for well-established professions. But, we argue, selecting talent for innovation requires a whole new approach. Companies must recognize specific innovation skills that drive business outcomes. Yet today, most lack the tools to do so.
A common misconception is that innovation can’t be taught. Similar to how some people believe that artists are born, not made – innovation has often seemed to be the purview of the great thinkers, the elite, people whose creativity is given, not a matter of practice…
Over recent years we have been tracking how companies identified as leading innovators subsequently perform in terms of growth in shareholder value. Linking innovation efficiency to out-performance against all major indices has proven the relationship that many across industry believe in and hope for: innovation pays. The latest round of analysis has just been completed and shows even greater performance than before.
This study seeks to answer two key questions about the front-end innovation: when do idea generation activities involving internal and external partner’s payoff, and which organizational capabilities support idea generation activities for achieving high front-end performance?
