Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

Comments

[PK Koduri]

Most successful innovations stand on the shoulders of hundreds of minor innovations that no one ever hears about. Case in point take the IPOD - without innovations in digital compression, hard drives, electronics, and materials we would never have such a product. But no one ever goes gaga over the components that make the IPOD all one sees is the final product - a sleek, well manufactured, user friendly device that is a pleasure to use. I am willing to bet even the inventors of these technologies couldn't have seen the multi-billion dollar industry that their inventions have enabled. The same thing can be said about several other products. Many companies fail to see this potential and kill many a good idea when they cannot see benefits immediately - ideas need to be nurtured with the expectation that just like kids some will excel and turn out to be great products and others will just wither away.