CHAPTER 9
Introducing “The Innovation Power Score”—A Method for Measuring the Potential of Your Innovation
We have created a simple way to measure how well you are doing in executing against the three interlocking circles that make up innovation—need, idea, and the communication that links the two. It is called The Innovation Power Score and it helps you to score each circle on its own merits, as well as the process as a whole. It will give you a solid idea of your chances of success, even before you launch your product or service into the marketplace.
“If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.”
—Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker’s quote is right, of course. If you can’t track your innovation efforts, there is no way you can expect to manage them properly. That’s why we invented the Innovation Power Score (IPS) as a methodology that not only measures how well you’re doing—or not doing—when it comes to your innovation efforts, but it is implicitly prescriptive as well. It allows you to tell at a glance what part of your innovation efforts need to be improved.
Not surprisingly, we are very proud of it. But, before you can start measuring anything, you need to know what you’re measuring. That seems obvious. Yet we are constantly surprised as we work with some of the world’s largest companies by how varied their definition of innovation is. We have seen a few companies that don’t have a working definition of innovation at all (management just assumes that every employee knows what ...
