For many organizations, setting, integrating and managing metrics has become standard operating procedure. In fact, there are business owners and leaders who can’t remember a time when they didn’t have performance metrics to help them manage and drive goals.
If this sounds like your organization, you're ready to think beyond conventional metrics in service of creating a culture that supports innovation by:
These unconventional metrics (along with your existing metrics) will create a framework and feedback loop that not only measures and rewards the right behavior for innovation now, but also lays the groundwork for new behaviors that will be needed for innovation in the future.
Key unconventional metric sets that support innovation include:
YOUR ACTION STEPS
Defining and implementing these metric sets is similar to the process you used to establish your current conventional organizational metrics. And, as with your existing metrics, they must support and align with your strategic organizational and growth goals.
Start by evaluating your organizational and growth goals and ask:
Which goals require or would greatly benefit from innovation? How will we measure that investment?
Answering these questions is very helpful because often innovation is a long-term play and measuring ROI allows you to breakdown and quantify the timeline.
Next, look at the systems, processes and infrastructure needed to support innovation and ask:
How can we best measure and evaluate whether or not our innovation capability is repeatable and sustainable?
Finally, innovation metrics won’t become integrated into the culture of your organization without strong, committed leadership. Make sure that management behaviors that support innovation are defined, tracked and rewarded. Here are a handful of behaviors to get you started:
