How do you measure innovation?
How do you quantify creativity? That almost seems like dancing about architecture, but it can be done if you have the right approach. Hard numbers and emotional sense alike will tell you how effective your innovation program is, but you need to measure both effectively.
Set A Baseline
Right when you begin, find a baseline. One effective method is to have employees fill out an anonymous survey. Among the questions you can ask are how open your employees believe you are to innovation, how likely they are on a scale of 1–10 to approach a co-worker or supervisor with an idea, and how they feel you’re doing in areas such as building a more sustainable business or increasing shareholder value. Make it a reasonably fast survey to fill out, and be sure to maintain full anonymity, both to get honest answers and to raise participation.
Who Uses Your Platform?
The next step is to look at who’s using your platform. Have employees who log into your platform fill out a few basic details as the first step, such as their age range, department, and gender. This will give you a sense of how they approach innovation. Ask them if they’ve taken ideas to coworkers or supervisors before, and whether they’d like to submit or whether they’re here to read and comment on other ideas. And don’t hesitate to ask how you were doing before in innovation. Even just asking them to rank you on a five-point scale will tell you quite about the culture at your company.
Start with data!
Follow Up
After you’ve finished a round of innovation strategy, that’s the point where you follow up. Ask the same questions you’ve asked before, to compare to your baseline, but also make a point of asking employees about how they’ve felt about the process so far, what value they’ve found in your innovation platform and strategy, and how they feel that’s helping them, or the company, better reach their goals. In some cases, it might make sense to inquire about what you should do in the next round.
Ask About Improvement
Similarly, don’t hesitate to ask for feedback on how to improve your approach. Just like innovation itself, any innovation strategy is a shifting work in progress that can constantly be refined for better approaches. In some cases, you might see innovation in the area of innovation strategy! But even if you don’t find perfect ideas, that feedback will help you gauge employee engagement. If they’re not fans of anything in the system, then it’s likely time to refine it.
Reiterate
Once you’ve finished this round of the process, start the next round, or fire up a new innovation strategy, and keep repeating. Remember, any collection of data is only something you’ve captured in a specific point in time. Your innovation strategy, your approach to your industry, your employee’s views, and other factors can change radically in short spaces of time. Those shifts, and a sense of why they happen, can often tell you just as much as any innovation strategy.
Innovation strategies are powerful tools, but they need fair and logical metrics. To learn more, contact us!
