Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Persistence: The Innovation Process Outcome

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When looking to evaluate innovation many seek to find numbers related to product adoption, revenue generated, people reached, when what they ought to consider first is process outcomes.

Sustainable innovation — a process, practice, and culture of design-driven creation — is the most valuable outcome for any organization. Innovation is not about creating a single item — product, service, policy — it’s about doing it regularly, consistently, over time.

Regular innovation only comes from persistence or what Seth Godin calls The Practice.

Measuring the practice — the amount of activity, persistence, and consistency of effort — is what any organization should be evaluated against. It fits with what we know about design thinking, performance and innovation: the more ideas you generate, the more prototypes you create, and the more attempts you make the more likely you are to have better ideas, more successful products, and create transformation.

Coming up with a single successful innovation is mostly good if you’re seeking to be bought up by a competitor and, while that can be lucrative, it’s not a sustainable strategy and is contingent on having one very good idea. Having many good ideas and having them implemented into practice is what creates sustainable, resilient organizations. It is what allows organizations to adapt in times of crisis and create new opportunities in times of contraction within your market.

This is what a culture of innovation is all about.

Metrics of Effort

There are many metrics and methods that can help capture the effort of your team in developing that culture of innovation. These can be used to complement questions we might ask about design thinking. Here are a few:

  • Number of attempts
  • Number of ideas generated / ideation sessions engaged in
  • Number of concepts proposed and prototypes developed
  • Background research gathered (e.g., artifacts)**
  • Consistently of application (i.e., ongoing use of a process and fidelity)
  • Number of solicitations for feedback from internal and external sources
  • Integrations within existing processes and tools
  • Materials used
  • Evaluation designs created for products or services
  • Evaluations implemented
  • Number of products launched outside of the organization
  • Number of new innovations generated (may be products, processes, or policy improvements)
  • Persistence of effort (e.g., continuity of activity, sequencing, and time-spent)

** note that research can be a trap. It’s easy to get stuck in over-researching something. While important as a product, it’s only useful if the research converts to real process or product efforts.

These are part of an Innovation Implementation Index that can help you to assess what innovation activities that you are undertaking and whether they are leading to an actual output or outcome.

By looking at not only what you do but how often and persistent your efforts are you will later be able to assess how your organization adopts, builds, and benefits from a culture of innovation.

Are you looking to build this with your organization, unit, or team? Contact us and we can help you build, assess, and sustain a culture of innovation in your organization.

Innovation Implementation Index

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What does it truly mean to say that you are an innovative organization? One of the simplest, most powerful measures is implementation. How many innovative initiatives have you launched and put into the world?

There are arguments why the QWERTY keyboard is inferior to other designs, but there’s no argument that its the best innovation we’ve ever had when it comes to typing. Why? It’s the one that was implemented into practice.

Success Marks

Checkmarks on a list usually imply some kind of rote behaviour that isn’t suitable for innovation, although checklists themselves are useful for quality control. We prefer the idea of ‘success marks’ which indicate that an idea has been successfully taken from concept and put into practice — whether or not it yields desired outcomes.

As an index, we propose the following six metrics:

  1. The number of new initiatives that have been implemented into practice
  2. The number of projects that have developed prototypes that have been tested
  3. The prototype ‘death rate’: divide the number of terminated prototypes by the total number of prototypes developed
  4. The number of prototypes moved into implementation (* which is a similar, but not necessarily the same number as #1)
  5. The number of new initiatives started:
  6. The initiative death rate: divide the number of ‘new’ projects started by the number of projects implemented

Number 1 is the most important of all of these.

The reason we count all six as part of an index is that each of these represents some form of concerted action and effort toward moving ideas out of concept into action with the lowest number (Number 1) representing the highest value to the organization.

While having ideas is a precursor to prototypes we don’t we count this because it is easy to game this metric.

We also don’t believe in coming up with metrics about innovation or even prototype quality because the success of implementation and the quality of the prototype don’t always match. You can implement an idea that is still in development, yet still has value that can be realized right away.

Want to show how innovative you are? Consider scoring yourself on these metrics to see how much of what your organization does is talk and how much of it is action.

Want to move ideas into action? We can help. And we can develop the metrics to show what kind of impact your innovation has in the world. Let us show you how.