Avoiding Innovation Bingo! 10 tips

Article by Graeme Mills, Innovation Excellence Lead at +ADD Strategy

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The team at +ADD Strategy are often told ‘we have it covered; check out our scorecard!’ …but when we look a little deeper, we find a host of challenges that can lead to relatively meaningless metrics and something more akin to a bingo card!….

There are many reasons why innovation performance is hard to measure. Here is our top 10…

1.      Check Motivation…Does your organisation really want to understand innovation performance? 

Are you simply paying lip service* to measuring innovation performance? This sounds a bit harsh…but typically large organisations like to play it safe. Most are conservative and stick to what works. Unfortunately, this exposes businesses to radical and disruptive change as well as that competition that came out of nowhere. to thrive in the longer term, you need to move beyond the safe zone and take on some risks. If you do not…someone else will and your brand like so many others (even large organisations) will fail to sustain.

Ask yourself, are we really interested in understanding our innovation performance, or do we just want to say we are innovative!?

2.      Deep organisational misunderstanding of what innovation is!

Innovation is simply creating and implementing meaningful points of difference for customers and beneficiaries, fulfilling unmet needs in new ways that make lives or jobs easier and more productive in a meaningful way (quicker, better, happier, exciting, or more satisfying for example). There is a grey line in the difference between iterative and incremental and more substantive innovation and many theoretical determinations, but the bottom line is ‘innovation’ affords brands differentiated value and maintains relevance as markets change and transform. Innovation is a gateway to customer delight and loyalty. It is often derived from a combination of existing technologies, systems and processes with new aspects that in combination derive a shift in value.

Innovation is NOT …

…just about new technical wonder solutions, silver bullets or upstream R&D in many cases. 

… an exclusive domain of practice filled with experts, scientists and engineers, or ‘qualified’ designers and creatives!

… ideation, and the creation of millions of fabulous ideas. (A function of corporate lip service* and innovation management fails)

Ask yourself, does your organisation understand innovation and have a clear focus on the role of innovation in achieving future ambitions?

3.      What exactly are you trying to measure?

We work with a wide range of clients and find many are actually trying to measure different aspects of innovation performance. This can be due to a range of reasons, the type of organisation, the culture or even which department is the owner of the task. Often client blend innovation capacity (people and culture), capability (processes, systems and aligned resources), and performance (results and impacts) together. These are not the same thing!

Ask yourself, how does your organisation define innovation priorities?   What does your organisation consider to be ‘Innovation’?

Consider whether you should be measuring innovation performance without consideration of capability and capacity? 

4. Avoid considering culture a ‘soft metric’

Assessing a firm’s innovation capacity and capabilities is really important to provide context to performance. Without this we cannot truly understand how to improve innovation performance. Like all aspects of business, innovation is delivered by humans. Some clients are draconian in simply focussing on outputs, failing to recognise this limited view could lead to failure as those ‘individuals’ driving innovation results become disenfranchised and move on to greener more supportive pastures.

Ask yourself, does your company value innovation capability in its teams and people? What examples would you us to demonstrate innovative culture in practice?

5.    Don't start with the wrong metrics!

I cannot say how many times we have been proudly told how many billions of ideas or shown an employee ideas platform. Sadly, this is a small part of the overall picture.  We should be far more interested in an organisations ability to discover and respond to new needs, define ‘the right’ challenges overall and the nature of innovation community engagement that leads to development and realisation of innovative solutions.

Ask yourself, what does your organisation measure, and is this in context with the real drivers for innovation in your organisation?

6.    Measure innovation performance and portfolio’s 'in context'!

When I started ADD Strategy as a business it was based on one principle idea – many corporates cannot innovate like an enterprise …. how can we fix this! In fact, all organisations typically start with one principle idea …or mission. Successful and larger established complex organisations have to manage a portfolio of little changes and big ambitious initiatives.  Whether the organisation is a not for profit charity or a global with 1000’s of consumer products in its portfolio should impact on how you measure ‘innovation performance’. Given this, an inflexible model with rigid measures for certain aspects is unlikely to provide a fair interpretation and insight.

Ask yourself, does your organisation operate an innovation portfolio and how is this expressed and engaged with?

7.     Don't just look for 'big wins' ...consider portfolio mix and diversity in measuring innovation

In essence larger organisations need a mixed portfolio of innovation and the ability to interpret and manage related risk and returns. Some companies struggle with commercial and shareholder justification of long-shot investments.  A question to ask here is whether leadership are interested in longer-term innovation or constrained by short and medium-term measures of success. 

Ask yourself, how does my organisation justify investment in long shots? Just how risk-averse are we and how does this affect our future potential? how many impactful changes were realised in the past year, and what are the barriers to accelerating innovation?

8.    Identify constraints and assumptions made in measuring innovation

There should be no limits as to where innovation comes from. In fact, intelligence is big business (See the ‘Innovation intelligence’ business from ADD Strategy!)

Innovation can come from our own staff or from observation of competitor and the broader market (or other markets!). Enterprise and smaller companies make up the bulk of our business population. Due to their limited resources they are very agile and can change dynamically to respond to market demands. Many great innovations come from this space, but corporations often struggle to engage with them due to risk and effort. In addition, in the drive for self-evidenced proof of value, regulated markets really struggle with enterprise engagement, agile and design led innovation practice. Although the right books are often on the shelf, many operate constrained ‘innovation models’, funding and call programmes driven by committee’s and institutions (ivory towers).

Ask yourself whether your market is able to engage in truly ‘open innovation’ and diverse innovation partnering? Is innovation in your organisation constrained or enabled in engaging with supply chain and enterprise communities by market structure and operation?

9.     Try and measure pace and efficiency

Time is money as they say, and it is just as true for innovation in practice. An idea may be less relevant if it takes too long to nurture into a fully-fledged solution. Given this how can you practically evaluate ‘pace’ in innovation. Another consideration should be availability of resources later in the innovation cycle. Many organisations hand-off developments to operational teams at a stage in the development cycle but fail to establish commitment from operational management and budgets that will enable investment in developments.

Ask yourself, do you consider your organisation to demonstrate pace in innovation practice? Also, how can you measure the level of resources being used in innovation and how would you measure the efficiency and value of returns?

10.   Ensure clarity, comparable results, and practical repeatability in your review

Of course, a focus on outcomes is essential. However, we also value insight from consideration of capacity and capability. We have developed an innovation performance scorecard and scale considering all three elements. With foresight, we have derived our ‘Innovation baseline’ programmes are based on the principals of the newly released ISO and British Standards in innovation (BS 56000). This supports both identification of areas for development and enhanced innovation management and practice.  Our tools provide a simple to read and comparable innovation scorecard as well as repeatability assessment for monitoring progress given investment in innovation by leadership.

Whichever tools you use its critical to ensure the effort of sustaining the measure does not outweigh the benefits. 

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OUR OFFER

Our innovation team would be delighted to assist you in performing and innovation baseline programme and establishing your own performance scorecard.

Our Innovation baseline programme enables us to explore where you are in terms of simple comparable measures. Our methodology includes a staff survey, supply chain and select staff insight interviews. We are privileged to have senior thought leaders on innovation strategy and management in our delivery community. Our practitioners are published and have high reputation. Your initiative will be led by a credible expert in innovation practice.

Offering a mix of online and offline tools, our innovation baseline programme is designed to both support the learning organisation with low-cost repeatability built-in, and help with readiness for formal certification in innovation excellence.

We help you explore:

• Innovation focus, strategy, goals and metrics (Scorecard)
• Development of challenge themes
• Principle innovation strategy and action planning
• Current innovation capacity
• Barriers and constraints to innovation success
• Policy environment and supplier community FIT
• Boundary spanners, networks and community
• Culture drivers and constraints
• Focused resource, skills and capability

Visit our case studies page for examples of the impacts of working with +ADD Strategy

Register for our FREE webinar this Thursday lunchtime

learn more about ‘Getting the measure of innovation!’ with experts Rob Douglas MBE of GCL (Standards), Jon Rains of Mott Macdonald (Innovation Leadership), Graeme Mills (Innovation Excellence) and Paul Sutherland (Innovation in practice) of +ADD.