Measuring Innovation

The JMP Blog has a half-advertisement, half-informative post today about measuring innovation. This post points the another NY Times Freakanomics blog post about the same idea: how does one go about measuring, quantifying, determining the impacts of, and analyzing innovation and how innovation grows a business, grows an industry, or grows global GDP?

Both blogs tend to agree that measuring innovation is hard. And the Freakanomics blog has several experts all talking about how measuring disruptive innovations (the invention of the Internet, cell phones, etc.) is really hard because there are so many factors and variables involved in attempting to measure such innovations.

I tend to think that all types of innovation can be measured, but this requires solid analytical reporting in the first place. In other words, I believe that an organization can be successful at measuring all types of innovation - from the mundane process improvement kinds, to the disruptive new way of living kind - if they already know how to accurately, deeply, and consistently measure their existing processes. For instance, this is my job right now at my workplace - innovate, and measure how my innovations are improving things. It's easy to measure how well my innovations are improving things right now because the accuracy measurements prior to my innovations had been reported on and tracked for a long time. So the innovations are clear. Having established additional deeper analytics as part of my innovation will allow me to continue measuring how future innovations outside of my department impact the data that I track.

But most companies, organizations, and teams are not typically interested in this level of detail understanding about their own processes. I believe this is why many teams fail to succeed as fully as they would like to - they don't understand their own work product through even the most rudimentary data reporting that they could make available to themselves throughout their daily work life.