Advancing Innovation

CHAPTER 13Innovation Value Score®

Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth.

—Peter Drucker

Calculating your IVS is only the beginning of understanding your innovation value and success, not the end point. Remember the images you painted in your mind in the introduction to Part IV?

Measurement enables dialogue and can help you make decisions and get more and better results. The measure element in innovation is iterative and ongoing. Measurement is a constant stride for balance, improvement, and value creation within your innovation governance framework.

IVS is about more than measurement—it is also about overall innovation value creation and management. But through measurement, you gain insight. With that insight, you can have dialogue and discussion about where you may want to invest or divest, where you want to make changes to your business strategy or execution, and how you want to adapt to the future and achieve your mission and visions.

You can and should think of calculating your IVS akin to Frederick Taylor’s time-and-motion studies. Did they perform time-and-motion studies to get a measure and then go home and call it a day? No, they performed the studies to get a baseline of results and then looked for ways to improve. This should be your ultimate innovation measurement goal: Get a baseline and improve the results.

As you can imagine, I was very deliberate in what I called this ...