That is an excellent question, Silburn, and I hope you attract some good discussion and answers.  One thread of my own work has been in the general area of services innovation, currently manifesting itself through work with ISSIP (International Society of Service Innovation Professionals).  I hope to return with more specifics, and maybe a synopsis of a particular piece of work I have been pursuing in terms of service-backed complementary currency.  I'd do that now but I'm under deadline pressure at the moment.

Appreciate the feedback Doug,

I do look forward to your further insights when you get some time

Cheers,.

Silburn

I agree that patents are not a great measure. We need to understand idea generation and practice modifications at the individual and collective level, and how they then relate to enhanced efficiencies as well as the creation of new forms of sales, products, markets etc. It is a very challenging question and I don't think we have a good way to do this currently.

Dear Silburn, Michael is right this is very challenging.

First of all some negative input may help. At an aerospace company, the organisation had design engineers whose design was drawn up by detail draughtsmen. Someone suggested measuring the number of drawings produced by the detailers as a measure of engineer productivity and innovation.

My question was simple; which way to push the metric? (yes, I was the engineering manager at that time :-). Someone said increase the number of drawings. OK, I'll ask my people to invent lots of new parts and not to use existing ones. Of course the effect would be much higher costs in manufacturing, inventory and maintenance.

Someone else said lower the metric. OK I'll send my people on extended holidays! Thanks goodness that daft idea was not taken up.

There were two suggestions that did work.

1). an A B and C sheet system with pass/no pass gates (as a way to manage the Stevens & Burley system you mention). an A sheet was a problem definition, a B sheet a solution to that problem and the C sheet the authorisation to manufacture. By normalising the size of the sheets a metric can be formed. A sheet, is cost to business of not solving the problem, C sheet is predicted cost of implementation. (there can be many B sheets to each A sheet etc.). The number of accepted B sheets (not those passed to manufacture) is a measure of innovation. One can then relate the benefit to the business by relating the B sheet to the importance of the A sheet (hence encouraging people to work on the more important business needs).

2). An employee suggestion scheme. Ideas are logged and evaluated by a panel and the best idea each month gets a prize. The prize is for the best idea, not the one that makes it through to implementation. The metric is the number of ideas that the panel decides are innovative.

Patent production and peer reviewed conference and journal papers also need to be in the mix, as they are a necessary but not sufficient measure.

Without this I have seen secretive military based organisations use secrecy to claim they are innovative, when in fact much better solutions were in the public domain.  Had they been subjected to peer review they would have known this.

Best of luck with your search for an answer.

Paul

The main problem of this kind of measurement is that we do not consider the invention as an innovation unless it helps organization performance . Innovation measurement relates to commercialization ideas that increase organization performance.

Based on open innovation approach, responsibility of offering innovation doesn't rely on employees innovation productivity but  also on many other factors. For instance, if the organization has an open business model that can make selling inappropriate patent to another organization more easily, this may consider as a transformation process from invention to innovation and makes the employee more innovative in the measurement scale. You cannot blame employees for something they do not control it.   This lead us to ask how organization manages its resources and collaboration with others.

On the other hand, the degree of innovation has a role in this case. If we rely on the number of innovation or even invention to make a judgement on the employee innovative without considering the impact of that activities on organization performance, the result will be misleading. Sometimes one innovation has a huge impact on organization performance more than many other innovations.

In my opinion, innovation productivity has to be measured on different dimensions. 

I hope my comment provides something useful.

Hi, Silburn,

1.  I thing the employee innovative performance means he/she defines new problems and develops IDEAS for their solution in the frame of the firm.

2. The output, or realization of innovation performance, or innovation result, could take different forms: developed new products, processes, introduced new organization within the firm, developed new markets, increased share of the export, developed new projects, developed new objects of industrial property, incl.patents, etc.

I have some survey results analysed based on such understanding.

If you find this way of thinking interesting, you may learn more from chapter 5 of the book 

Chobanova R. (2011) Innovativeness of a national economy: The case of Bulgaria. Germany; U.K.; U.S.A.: Lambert Academic Publishing. 361 p. . ISBN 978-3-8465-3096-2

available from amazon.

Good luck!

Rossitsa

http://www.amazon.com/Innovativeness-national-economy-case-Bulgaria/dp/3846530964

Paul,

Your ABC sheet appears very effective at tracking the evolutions along the funnel.

Michael / Paul:

Janssen (2000) as well as de Jong & den Hartog (2007, 2010) posit that employee innovative work behaviour has four dimensions (idea exploration, idea generation, idea championing and idea implementation). 

see https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228254317_Measuring_Innovative_Work_Behaviour

A similar model by Prof Min Basadur (https://www.basadurprofile.com/about.aspx) conceptualises that the individual creative thinking and problem solving process, at its highest level,  is four phased/four dimensioned consisting of idea generation, idea conceptualising, idea optimising and idea implementation.

Basadur's Simplex applied creativity (aka innovation) process further explodes into an eight-stage fine-grained cycle comprising;

1. Problem finding.

2. Fact finding.

3. Problem definition.

4. Idea finding.

5. Selection and evaluation.

6. Planning.

7. Selling of the idea.

8. Action.

Silburn

Article Measuring Innovative Work Behavior

Abdalla,

Thank you for sharing on the interesting concept of innnovation productivity. Was not aware of this before now.

Silburn

Hi Rossitsa,

I would concur that employee innovative performance or output would necessarily have to be translated into solving problems that result  in performance benefits in the frame of the firm.

To my mind that's the acid test.

I will check on your study from your book on Amazon

Silburn

Another challenge in the examination of innovation is its multi-level nature,

The phenomena can be looked at from the individual, group, firm, sector, industry, societal,  national or regional perspectives.

Hence the specific  focus at the moment on limiting the enquiry to the individual employee level, without any assumptions being made as to how innovation at the individual level rolls up to the firm level.  

(Hofstede, 1980) in cautioning on  dangers of ecological fallacy caused by mixing levels of analysis relating to countries or societies, firms and individuals, and using forests as his metaphor,  argued that were  countries to be analogous to forests then organisations would be trees; hence requiring different theories, models, methods.

Similarly, by extension of the metaphor, individuals would represent the leaves on the trees.

So a la Hofstede, just as you would not have healthy trees without leaves, it is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation at the firm level,  for there to be innovative output at the individual level.   

Innovative output at the individual level is therefore a basic building block.

Hi, Siburn,

Of course, it is correct to look at employee innovative output from different perspectives.

But if we are focused on the firm level then the employee innovative output, we try to identify is the one, that contribute to achieving the  goal of the firm (its mission), and that this output is taking different forms (I guess they could be defined in the frame of the Schumpeter tradition as suggested in my previous input).

Here we could discuss who and why needs to define the employee innovative output. Then the answers could differ.

Rossitsa

Hi Rossitsa,

You raise two important points on the matters of "who needs to define employee innovative output" and also on "why" .   

In both Axtell et al 2000 and again in the de Jong & den Hartog's 2010 studies on employee innovative output, self-reports from employees were employed.  In relation to the question of "why"; this was done on the basis that  subordinates have better, deeper, more intimate and more nuanced knowledge of their own innovative output than do their supervisors.

Axtell et al 2000, however, concluded that self-reports were a weakness and called for the use of independent measures of the variables where that were feasible.

Silburn

In many firms, the key driver for operational excellence is "transformation through innovation”.

I found an interesting article written by Soren Kaplan entitled "How To Measure Innovation (To Get Real Results)" 

According to McKinsey, more than 70% of corporate leaders tout innovation as a top three business priority, but only 22% set innovation performance metrics.

One reason why that innovation metric gap exists is because there’s no set formula for what fuels innovation. What works for one company might be too fuzzy for the next. That said, there are a few things you can measure in order to figure out how innovative your company's culture is—it's the first step in figuring out how to reshape that environment and start promoting new behaviors.

Leadership

Percent of new innovations that come from external sources like crowdsourcing or open innovation

Percent of funding for game changers versus small tweaks to existing products or services

Percent of senior executive time focused on the future versus on daily operations

Employees

Number of ideas turned into patents by employees

Number of ideas turned into innovation experiments by employees

Number of teams that submit projects for innovation awards

Percentage of employees trained in the innovation process

Customers

Number of ideas submitted by customers through "open innovation" programs

Number of new product or service ideas that come from mining social networks

Number of customers that help test and refine new ideas

Regards

Zoheir

Thanks for sharing those attributes Zoheir,

Some questions from a six-item Employee Innovative Output (de Jong et al 2010) scale includes:

1. In the job, the employee often actively contributes to the development of new products or services

2. In the job, the employee often makes suggestions to improve current products or services

3. In the job, the employee often produces ideas to improve work practices

4. In the job, the employee often optimises the organisation of work

SC

A suggestion based on a 3M practice: the % of revue over X time coming from employees' ideas.

May be to look at successfull companies.

VDL grew in 60 years from 10 to 10000 employees, the director says he got successfull when he started to talk with his people. He still talks with his employees at the floor. There is a lot of knowledge in a company that is currently neglected.

http://www.vdlgroep.com/?page/551/Profiel.aspx

Hi Bengt

pl clarify for me "revue over"

SC

Thanks for sharing on  VDL Berend,

There are indeed great lessons to be learnt from successful companies like VDL

Their story is inspiring. From a small 6-employees firm in 1953 to a 10,000-person operation today, while retaining the agility and innovativeness of  an SME is simply brilliant leadership.

Silburn

Berend,

Another successful company to look at is HCL Technologies.  They are reported to have unleashed employee-level innovation in their firm by encouraging an entrepreneurial mind-set in employees.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/leadership-books/post/vineet-nayars-employee-first-customer-second/2011/03/07/gJQARyynaV_blog.html

https://hbr.org/product/employees-first-customers-second-turning-conventio/an/12330-HBK-ENG

Silburn

Hello,

patents quite rarely result in innovations - about 1 % of patents lead to innovation (Mulej et al. 2008). Therefore, I would not count them as a particularly realiable way of measuring innovation output.

Of course, measuring direct financial impact is one possible way, but this would  neglect the needed "time lag"  and also the "impact of smaller innovations". A solution might be to measure total, financial and nonfinancial benefit on a scale (1-7) covering a wide range of innovations, such as I did with colleagues:

1. Total benefit of the company from: Product innovation

2. Total benefit of the company from: Service innovation

3. Total benefit of the company from: Procedure / process innovation

4. Total benefit of the company from:Organisational innovation

5. Total benefit of the company from:Marketing innovation

6. Total benefit of the company from: Business model innovation

For details pls. see:

Ropret, M., Fatur, P., Rodman, K., & Likar, B. (2012). Factors of successful innovation in services and a performance comparison with manufacturing sector. International Journal of Innovation and Learning, 12(4), 379-401.

Kind regards,

Marko

Over x time: example: 25 per cent of a biz area revenue generated by products introduced in the three (x) last years

Hi Silborn,

Please see this information with specifictopics to evalute innovation in European Union countries

http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/files/ius/ius-2014_en.pdf

Appreciate the link Aida

Hi

please see below article, i interested on the subject , most of people have confuse between creativity and innovation.

please if you find cleare items for performance innovation performance send to me

[email protected]

Regrades

Khalili, A. (2017). Creative and innovative leadership: measurement development and validation. Management Research Review, 40(10), 1117-1138.