Measuring Innovation: From Process to Stages to Capabilities to Measures to Business Value

Measuring innovation requires an organization to have a well-articulated innovation process. Without a process, measurement is impossible. During our research, we arrived at the following stages of innovation: (1) generation and mobilization, (2) advocacy and screening, (3) experimentation, (4) commercialization, and (5) diffusion and implementation. For each of these phases, we identified underlying capabilities that an organization must execute: (1) sources management, (2) analytics management, (3) interpretation management, and (4) action management. These capabilities are comprised of a series of activities. For instance, in sources management, (a) Identifying Sources, (b) Evaluating Source Characteristics, (c) Organizing Sources, (d) Retrieving Ideas from Sources, (e) Updating the Collection of Sources, and (f) Protecting Sources.

Once we are able to make the process of innovation explicit, we can develop measures for the process. We start by measuring the activities, then build composites for measuring capabilities, which in turn will help us measure each stage, and then the overall innovation process.

Using these measures, we can link innovation to business value measures, from process to output, and value measures.

More details will be forthcoming as we begin to release our working papers.