Gartner Insights Abstract

How to Measure the Success of Your Innovation Process

Published: 03 July 2024

Summary

Technology innovation leaders struggle to demonstrate innovation success against their desired business outcomes and innovation goals. They should use a combination of quantitative and qualitative metrics to measure their innovation inputs, outputs and process effectiveness.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Demonstrating success in innovation is difficult. Even when desired business outcomes are known, the path toward them is not immediately clear or guaranteed.

  • The time lag between early innovation efforts and ultimate business outcomes means that outcome-based metrics are too late to guide meaningful leadership decisions in the management of innovation. Conversely, leading metrics are often difficult to use as an indication of business value.

  • The challenge in finding meaningful and timely metrics can lead to pitfalls like selecting and sticking to metrics based on ease of measurement rather than relevance to business and innovation goals. This can lead to

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