Can you measure the impact from innovation?
BLOG | PHILMCKINNEY | FEBRUARY 1, 2010 AT 12:41 PM
One of the constant challenges for an innovator is to prove the value of their work. Many believe that innovation and creativity cannot be measured and therefore will always struggle with getting the respect it deserves within an organization.
The perception that innovation impact cannot be measures is a myth. At the same time, its not a slam dunk either. The challenge is getting an organization aligned on what the right metrics and measurements.
via Can you measure the impact from innovation? | Phil McKinney – Sharing his experiences on innovation, creativity and ingenuity.
“The Economist believes that the world is governed by ideas. Because human progress relies on the advancement of good ideas, we are launching a new series of events that brings together top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time. By focusing on Innovation, Intelligent Infrastructure, and Human Potential, we imagine an ecosystem where good ideas move from concept to implementation, fueled by the power of human ingenuity, and only the best survive. Welcome to the Ideas Economy.”
See http://ideas.economist.com/ for more.
A very good post by Twitter‘s CEO, Evan Williams, with more than 2 years already, on alternative ways he came up to assess ideas. Excerpt:
“Tractability
Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
Blogger was highly tractable. Twitter was tractable, but sightly less-so because of the SMS component. Google web search had quite low tractability when they launched it. Vista?: About as low as you can get.”
Read the full article – it’s worth it:
http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp
By Stefan Lindegaard:
“Open innovation will not only lead to new ways of making innovation happen. Innovation leaders and their executives will also experience side effects. I think most of these effects will be positive, but some will be mixed or perhaps even negative.
As innovation leaders and their executives implement open innovation practices, they can just as well start figuring out how to deal with side effects of open innovation such as described below.“
The full article:
The Side Effects of Open Innovation
Another insightful article by John L. Mariotti about the usefulness of ideas. This excerpt is taken from the introductory paragraph:
“There are millions of clever ideas out there. The challenge is whether there is a need for these ideas that is strong enough to cause someone to “buy them.” Just because an idea is neat, unique, clever or even useful, doesn’t mean that discriminating buyers will pay for it.”
The full article:
Inventions: Solutions in Search of Problems : Innovation :: American Express OPEN Forum.
Illustration by Lars Leetaru
A very good article by Zia Khan and Jon Katzenbach at Strategy+Business on the fact that some (bad) ideas should have been killed but actually weren’t. Take a look at this introduction:
““Why don’t we have enough good ideas? How can we tell which idea is going to be the next big thing? Why is it so hard to get an idea from the drawing board into the market?” Most telling of all is the question: “Why do we still waste resources on ideas that people don’t believe in?” In other words, even though an idea has been effectively “killed,” it still remains on the agenda, with nobody fully willing to learn from the mistake, put it to rest, and move on to other endeavors.”
Read the full article:
http://www.strategy-business.com/article/09303?pg=all
Paul Sloane writes and gives keynote talks on innovation. This is an excerpt of one of his latest articles:
“How can you measure how well your organization is doing with innovation? What metrics can you use? Most corporations find it difficult to measure innovation in any satisfactory way. But there is help at hand.”
Read the full article:
What Are the Best Metrics for Measuring Innovation? – associatedcontent.com.
This is an interesting article by Tim Kastelle on the problem ideas face in old, big, fat organizations: they just don’t spread!
The introduction:
“The fundamental point that I was trying to make in yesterday’s post is that most of us are facing the same innovation problem: it is extremely difficult to get new ideas to spread within most organisations. We are a bit deceived because we hear about innovation at Google, and 3M, and Apple, and we think that all of our organisations should work like that. Unfortunately, most of them don’t. My examples yesterday came from education, and I know that a lot of people in the public sector think that innovation is unusually hard in their organisations. But nearly everyone resists change.”
Read the full article at timkastelle.org:
http://timkastelle.org/blog/2010/02/new-ideas-in-old-systems/
