Question

You have just been appointed as an innovation manager in an ambitious medium-sized company designing and producing power tools (such as drills and saws). The company wants to promote breakthrough innovation. One of your first tasks is to think about innovation performance metrics to use. What advice will you give to the CEO regarding the metrics?

Answer 1

There are many innovation metrics that can help the management understand that the creative change is successful or needs some alterations, for the company that we are operating in, the best metrics are:

- Return on investment: The method should cut costs and ultimately increase profits, after one quarter if implementation we can see what was the cost that was invested to bring it to practice and what has been the reduction in costs.

- Another advice that I wold want to give is that it is very important for us as a team to check and verify that do we have the necessary infrastructure to implement that innovative idea or not. If yes then what would be the amount and skill level of resources required to get the job done.

- Lastly we need to have a turnaround time and a deadline wherein we will test the innovation using the metric so that we can proactively take necessary measures to fix things.