1. Metrics should help set up design and innovation teams to be part of the larger strategic conversation.

To help demystify design and innovation, a metrics system should reassure its stakeholders by providing structure for an otherwise nebulous process. This system should also communicate value and quality by linking the innovation or design team’s actions and efforts to the outcomes they’ve achieved. Linking actions to outcomes enables better informed design and innovation investments in the future, provides rationale for bigger design budgets, and opens the doors to more strategic conversations within our business.

2. A good metrics system should also add value to the project work itself.

Instead of giving design and innovation teams yet another task to do, a design measurement system should help organize what the teams are already doing, and help allocate resources and work-stream activities. It can do this by providing a framework that creates alignment between stakeholders at the onset of the project and helps articulate priorities and goals. As the project unfolds, the information that comes out of using this system should help inform and influence the decisions that are important to the success of the team.

An innovation metrics system needs to be tailored to the creative process.

Innovation projects typically include exploration and uncertainty, and concrete outcomes are often unknown at the outset – even when teams begin with a set of clearly articulated goals. Ambiguity, dead-ends, and iteration are part of the creative process and need to be factored in. This requires space, time, and flexibility.

This kind of flexibility to explore is built into the culture at companies like 3M, Google and within our own HP Labs. Employees are encouraged to take time to tinker and explore new ideas. Innovation projects need to allow similar latitude for this kind of exploration and provide opportunities for course correction, as when new insights emerge. For a measurement system, this means that the work-stream activities a development team chooses and the in-process metrics it uses to manage the project should be allowed to emerge dynamically with the innovation process.  Allowing teams to set up measurement systems that make sense to them and their process will help set up the project and the team for constructive work and ultimately, success.

A system for measuring innovation needs to be flexible, but built on a solid frame.

To allow for this kind of dynamism, a measurement system seeking to enhance the innovation process needs to have some elements which are fixed and some which are flexible. Fixed elements are needed to help ensure that different product teams are moving in the same direction, that their work is relevant to the company as a whole, and that they will deliver results to keep pace with the market. For example, projects should always draw from, and be in alignment with, the company’s strategic initiatives. These are fixed. Whether the strategy is to differentiate the company’s products, drive operational efficiency, or develop new markets, these high-level strategies should be taken as givens and used to align the team.

Related posts:

1. Five Key Strategies for Making Metrics
2. Design Council’s Lessons from America
3. Five Key Strategies for Managing Change
4. Design Strategies for Technology Adoption
5. Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations