Metrics for innovation: guidelines for developing a customized suite of innovation metrics

During the past year, the authors have built a framework for a suite of metrics that senior managers can customize to track and promote innovation success in their companies.

Senior executives can use the suite of metrics to assess their company's innovativeness over time and hence combat the insidious strategy decay that often afflicts a company's business.

The framework combines three views on innovation – resource, capability, and leadership – providing the perspective to develop a suite of metrics for assessing and developing a company's capacity for innovation.

The optimal selection of metrics and the optimal value or “sweet spot” of any particular metric will vary from company to company.

As more firms develop strategic innovation metrics and a database that validates their relevance, top managers will learn to assess and guide a company's innovation capability more effectively.

This is the first strategic guideline for building a customizable system of innovation metrics.