What are the most important KPIs for product innovation?

Some examples: 1. Customer Adoption Rate: Monitor how swiftly your target audience is embracing the product. 2. User Engagement: is the prduct actually filling a demand gap? 5. Net Promoter Score (NPS): This metric gets to the heart of customer sentiment in simple measures.

Product performance is an important KPI, but how you measure performance is paramount. Setting those measurement criteria prior to launch is the key to analyzing performance with no bias. How do you measure quality? Is it number of times used? Over a specific time period? These are important guide rails for your analytical journey for your product. What you do in the lab -vs- getting a true ethnographic read of your audience takes away a lot of the subjectivity. Ensure you have set guidelines on how you will measure performance to avoid the "I think" versus "I know" and any surprises that come later when your product hits the market!

Market share - this is one of the hardest KPIs to measure without a clear and defined source of information. Will you buy it from a syndicated service? Or cobble together market size and sales yourself? Going through the exercise yourself will certainly yield knowledge of your competition, but will it be accurate enough to use in a presentation to management or a retailer? There are also other services to purchase a one-off report from Statista or others, but often they are global and don't get into the details needed for a specific geographic market. If you are okay with none of the data being perfect, if you can't afford the syndicated data that most of your largest competitors have purchased, sometimes your learn more doing it yourself.

In an external innovation project such as a corporate-startup partnership programme, the innovation pipeline or funnel metrics can include the following: - Number of startups applied for the programme - Number of relevant applications addressing one of the corporate's innovation needs - Number of startups evaluated for a pilot - Number of pilots completed - Number of pilots with a positive business case - Number of pilots converted into a full-scale launch (pilot/rollout conversion rate) - Number of new products/services still on the market after one year

A successful innovation pipeline begins with goal-setting. What percentage of your sales should come from innovation? What sources are responsible for innovation? Outside inventors, inside product development, outside developers, think tanks? Each of these affect your budget differently. Inventors take a percentage and an advance, the think tanks work a myriad of deals, and investing in innovation takes time and requires spending as well. Understanding where you get your ideas, how much time and in the end how much it costs the organization is as important as filling that pipeline. Understanding where you spend your time and money on innovation helps perfect your pipeline, and ensuring that someone is tracking progress is equally important.

In my experience as facilitator of 100+ innovation projects you MEASURE PROGRESS IN INNOVATION IN 10 WAYS: 1. Idea Generation Rate: Measure the number of new ideas generated. 2. Idea Conversion Rate: Track the % of ideas that progress from the ideation to launch. 3. Employee Engagement in Innovation Activities 4. Time-to-Market: Monitor the time it takes for innovative ideas to be launched. 5. Return on Innovation Investment (ROII): Calculate the return for innovation initiatives. 6. Employee Satisfaction and Retention. 7. Collaboration Index: Assess the level of knowledge-sharing. 8. Employee Training and Development in Innovation. 9. External Recognition and Awards: Monitor the number of awards. 10. Benchmark with Peers.

Sometimes we miss the nuances of innovation nods that are truly objective. Mentions from "experts" in tech, writers and editors that are evaluating category bests that aren't affected by ad spending. Industry awards where it's not a popularity contest and instead a vote of your peers. People's admiration for your company's ability to do something different in a stayed industry - this is an important measure that says "you took a risk and it worked." Innovator/partner awards from retailers who saw the results and praise you for the work. These are legitimate ways to know your innovation is working along with the classic and usual indicators.