Til forsiden

To the recent conversation about innovation metrics – ways of measuring and evaluating successful innovations, innovation processes, and cultures of innovation – Michael Schrage adds an interesting twist.  Schrage, best known perhaps for his 1999 book, Serious Play (about using games for group innovation and learning), recently published a fascinating article in Booz & Co.’s journal, strategy + business:  “The Metric behind the Slogan.” 

Citing numerous examples from the recent history of mostly technological innovation, Schrage puts the cart before the horse and observes that it is as important to invent the right metric as it is to invent the right solution.  The right metric is one that demonstrates the power of the solution as existing metrics do not. 

For example – and I love this, it’s so graphic – when James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and his partner Matthew Boulton set out to market a commercial version, they selected brewmasters (makers of beer) as their initial target market.  Observes Schrage,

But 18th-century British breweries used horses — not steam — to power the turning of their mills’ grindstones. So it behooved Boulton and Watt to recalculate their steam engines’ appeal accordingly. After a period of equine observation, Watt determined that the typical coal-mine pony could pull 22,000 foot-pounds per minute. To extrapolate this finding to a large horse, Watt increased these test results by 50 percent — i.e., 33,000 foot-pounds of work per minute — and called it horsepower.

Some historians believe that Watt overstated the amount of power that a horse can deliver over a sustained period of time. Nonetheless, his comparison of steam engine output to a team of horses working together proved to be a remarkably persuasive marketing metric for prospective purchasers, whether brewers, millers, or mine owners. Horsepower became a global standard that helped build the Boulton & Watt brand and business.

Who would have known?  And we continue to use this organic, now obsolete metric to measure the productive energy-generating output of dams, automobiles, children on seesaws, and ion-drive engines in the deeps of space.  We use the same irrelevant metric to judge the leafblowers that gardeners use to waken us early in the morning, uselessly blowing dust around -- 2/3-horsepower, a fraction of a horse -- and the overpowered luxury sport cars that waste fuel and endanger the lives of everyone on the road.  The most interesting use of “horsepower” for a positive end – achieved though an awkward horsepower conversion – is the claim by peak-oil advocates a single barrel of oil is equal to 10,000 hours (about 42 years) of human labor, one reason why we are petroleum addicted.  There certainly are enough un- and underemployed people to do much of the work that we consign to petroleum-powered engines.  But who can hitch 200 horses to their automobile?

The point Schrage makes is this:

This notion of using innovative metrics — measures that gauge the unique value inherent in an innovation as a means of marketing it — goes well beyond the traditional approach of adding new “features” and “functionality” to attract consumers to products and services. By creating fresh language for the way people calibrate the worth and efficacy of a particular idea, innovative metrics have the potential to be so intrinsically compelling — or at least so creatively marketed — that they become, like horsepower, the overriding identity of a product or brand. Which means, in turn, that these metrics should be crafted with the same singular sensibility as the inventions themselves.

Though there is a potential downside to metric innovation.  Schrage notes that “with the enormous losses sustained by so many ‘innovative’ lenders, investors are likely to think twice before they trust the metrics offered by some financial-services firms to sell their novel products and services.” 

But the risk is worth it, in Schrage’s opinion: “Indeed, as many innovators are learning, oftentimes the best way to take the measure of a new market is to create a new measure for the market.”

What new metrics suit the emerging trends in innovation management?  Besides dollars and cents earned and saved, or customer satisfaction (whatever that means), there are opportunities here.  I propose these:

• Futures foreseen and anticipated (requires first delineating “futures”)
• Corporate well being and organizational tone
• Number of clear views of possible / attractive market opportunities
• Crisis-survival rate (requires first defining “crises”)
• Innovations well evaluated, implemented successfully, and productive
• Product-cycle speed and efficacy
• Idea-induction velocity across the organization and beyond its boundaries

-- Bob Jacobson, GEMBA
 

Images: surrealmuse, Creative Commons license; Iowa Horse Fair