The Power of Reflection on Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle, the Creative Leadership Forum

In creativity, it is often not until you have completed a piece of work that the obvious intent of the work appears to you.

This is particularly relevant in the case of innovation. Personal creativity, the input that produces organizational innovation, never follows a direct path and this has important strategic implications for organizations pursuing systemic innovation as a prime business objective.

Our challenge in developing the analytic, the Management Innovation Index™ (the MIX™), was to model an organization's innovation as a whole system in order to make innovation measurable. Over 3 years, we trialled...read more....

The change-capable organization and the importance of metrics - accenture

One of the odd paradoxes of organizational change is that all the initiatives companies undertake to support major transformations—learning programs, structural changes, communications plans and the like—can actually prevent effective change as much as enable it. The enemy is time. It may take months to bring a team on board to design and execute a change program, then several more months to make the transition to a new way of working. By that time, who can be sure the initiative is even relevant to the real business issues of the day? Maybe, instead, the change program ends up being more like last year’s fashions—handsome and well crafted, but out of date.

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Is it Really Possible To Measure Creativity? - Series of Papers - The European Commission Education and Training

The International Conference "Can creativity be measured?" produced by the European Commission on Education and Training offered an overview of the different ways of measuring creativity at national, regional and individual levels. As a first step towards tackling this challenge, Measuring Creativity looks at all these perspectives and provides a wide analysis of measuring specific aspects related to creativity. This site offers  a series of excellent articles on this intriguing and vexed questions.

Innovation Metrics - A Whole Brain Strategy

As much as I am opposed to the very notion of metrics in innovation, this article from Michael Brown of Brainzooming offers at least a starting point around the perplexing conundrum innovation measurement. Metrics strategy is a vital topic relative to innovation. Despite how important metrics strategy is, it's a challenging one for many businesses when it comes to innovation. Going back through my own experiences and secondary research on innovation metrics, here are a few starting thoughts on developing your metrics strategy: Begin developing your innovation metrics strategy by determining what factors drive ROI. Specifically identify which factors increase positive business returns and which reduce necessary investment. Starting with the end result in mind will better align the overall innovation effort toward delivering a positive return on investment.

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We are What We Measure

Regardless of your politics, the closing quote delivered at TED this week by David Cameron, the leader of the current British conservative party leader somehow seems to me so poignant right now. The odd thing is the quote comes from a speech made by  Robert Kennedy in the early 60’s . It's long, but so powerful it's worth repeating in its entirety:

    "For too long we seem to have surrendered personal excellence and community value in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product now is over 800 billion dollars a year, but that gross national product, if we judge the United States of America by that, that gross national product counts air pollution, and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic squall. It counts Napalm, and it counts nuclear warheads, and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our city. It counts Whitman's rifles and Speck's Knifes and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet, the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play; it does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth while. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans."