Your company recently introduced a new product to the market, and it has been a huge success. But do you know why? Can you trace the product delivered back to the original idea? Can you improve the innovation strategy? You need to learn to measure innovation capability.
According to Tech Clarity, to best monitor and improve your organization’s innovation capability, there are five factors to consider: innovation contributions, strategic portfolio metrics, calculated risk taking, time and space to innovate, and NPDI control.
Read the blog series and by starting with part 1: Why You Should Measure Innovation by Capability and then part 2: How to Measure Innovation Capability where I share 3 of the 5 factors to improve your ability to innovate (from Tech Clarity).
To round out the series, this blog covers the final two ways to measure innovation capability and how product portfolio management can offer help you continuously measure and improve innovation across the board.
Measuring Product Innovation Capability (Read 1-3 now)
- Ensure You Have the Time and Space to Innovate—time should be spent on “research,” in addition to “development.” Give your teams space and budget to experiment with new ideas and collaborate throughout the process. Of course, the time being spent can be difficult to gauge, but you can measure it through deliverables, such as the number of ideas submitted or the number of collaborations recorded. You may even consider analyzing physical space availability, to form a kind of “innovation lab” for your teams.
- Measure NPDI Control—track metrics such as resource utilization, percentage of projects meeting deadlines and budgets, and the percentage of projects meeting full requirements to ensure your company can effectively deliver new products to market. You must be able to innovate across the product development lifecycle, and doing so will allow you to better balance workload with capacity, as well as expectations.
Understand Why Your Innovation Strategy Was (or was not) a Success
You need to understand what went well, what didn’t work, where you best ideas are coming from. But where do you start? Truth is, most companies find this challenging due to their patchwork of spreadsheets and documents. For most companies, this is the biggest challenge, as it takes a resource commitment and accurate portfolio data. Taking all recommendations from Tech Clarity into account, it’s time to dive into how to truly implement your chosen metrics.
Improve Innovation Strategy – From Idea to Launch and Beyond
To achieve a truly effective innovation strategy, companies must utilize a product portfolio management solution (PPM) that equips them with the ability to deliver the most innovative, profitable, differentiated products to market.
You need centralized data that is consistent across departments and the business, so your team can spend less time debating on where ideas came from and more time focusing on the facts and their implications. PPM systems can provide the structure necessary to achieve this level of infrastructure (and eliminate the endless spreadsheets). With the right solution, your organization can support accurate, efficient reporting, thus enhancing your visibility into innovation capability and performance to make decisions that advance your innovation strategy.
I invite you to read the full whitepaper, Top 5 Ways to Measure Product Innovation, to learn more about measuring innovation capability and the five factors covered in this blog series. If you want to see a solution like this in action, watch the demo. Leave a comment below with how your company is currently measuring innovation.
