Innovationperformance

In a basic view, innovation is a process and every process needs to be managed.

Innovation is the process to generate fresh ideas, transform them to achieve their commercial value. Overall speaking, innovation has a very low success rate. The problem is that many organizations do not set the right conditions for increasing the probability of innovation success. Also, they don’t set the right key performance indicators to measure results from innovation efforts. 

You can only manage what you measure. One of the critical goals for innovation performance management is to create new revenue and drive early success to create a positive spiral or build an innovative culture, and produce high performance results in a consistent way. 

Idea management performance: Individually, our thinking has to continuously evolve, adopt, and prepare for changes to generate more ideas for inventing the future together. Most good ideas emerge from interactions, not single individuals. Collectively, every organization has a flow of ideas, it’s important to make sure that the company has a steady flow of fresh ideas floating in the innovation pipeline, and there are established methodological platforms and processes that allow you to do that in an efficient way.

Innovation happens at the intersection of people and technology, organizations and customers. The innovation management needs to ponder how to accelerate idea validation and streamline innovation processes. Otherwise, you’ll run the risk of spending too much time and effort chasing down bad ideas. Besides validating ideas, it’s also important to validate innovation processes, platforms, systems, or tools based on the very characteristics such as simplicity of use, flexibility to manage different discussions, collaborative systems & tools to encourage idea sharing, transparency in follow-up, as well as the deep analysis of how to quantify the potential benefits of those ideas; what is expected for market size, the expected cost or profit, list the pros & cons of ideas, etc. Both quantity and quality count in idea measurement and management.

Innovation implementation process management performance:

Innovation implementation is the process on how to transform novel ideas into business values. Most companies fail at innovation execution because they neither have any clear process to improve vertical accountability nor understand the linkage required to work horizontally across disciplinarily. In practice, creating a disciplined, managed space for developing and testing new models, products, and business approaches is challenging. One of the most important differences between an innovation and a conventional business initiative is risk. Compared to other types of business initiatives, it often takes quite some time for a new innovation driver to produce meaningful measures. It is difficult to measure the impact without taking the time to generate impacts. The right level of performance guidance and process is important, but overly rigid processes or too pushy goals will create new bottlenecks and stifle innovation.

Normally organizations evaluate business results generated by innovation efforts - are you intending to evaluate the organizational capacity/potential to innovate, or the level of past innovation performance measures? More organizations are looking for integrations with innovation initiative portfolio management to ensure the ideas go straight from platforms into specialized processes to help them manage the portfolio of potential projects, and manage the execution of each. A loosely structured, circular process allows companies to enhance cross-boundary collaboration and seamless integration for building innovative products/solutions and reaching the high level of the innovation implementation maturity.

Innovation competency assessment: To develop the organizational level innovation competency, it’s important to build a strong innovation navigation process, idea generation process, implementation process, talent management process, as well as measurement process. All those processes are not static, but dynamic, flexible, and keep evolving. Different types of innovation should be managed via tailored management processes. A leading organization with innovation competency can handle innovation streams for different goals and different time frames and manage a balanced portfolio including both radical innovation and incremental innovation, hard innovation, and soft innovation.

Either at the individual or business level, innovation performance is mostly a mix of past and present; and potential relates to the innovation competency which can be developed and catalyze the future performance. A holistic assessment of innovation competency is crucial for the company to improve the long term business success. It’s always critical to select some leading key performance indicators for measuring innovation results in the long run and help to make continuous improvement. Both hard elements such as processes, structures and soft elements such as leadership, culture matter for building innovation competency via a good alignment of great innovators, reliable information, disruptive technologies, and rigorous but not overly rigid processes.


In a basic view, innovation is a process and every process needs to be managed. Given the dynamic nature of business and the complex mix of its resources and business factors, a well-defined set of innovation performance metrics need to be considered in better measures of innovation success such as revenue sustainability, customer satisfaction, or brand reputation.

Posted in: Innovation,Performance Master