At InnoMetrix, we help clients connect the dots between innovation and performance. It can be a time-consuming challenge to plan workforce and capital investments associated with innovation and then attribute the impact on business performance. For many organizations, innovation performance management involves a jumble of tools including spreadsheets, Word docs, PowerPoints, emails and more – leading to errors, inefficiencies and poor reporting. Nevertheless, it’s critical to record the true contribution of innovation and transformation to growth, as it helps steer future goals, strategies and initiatives. Our mission is to connect those dots in a comprehensive, accurate and actionable way for leadership and transformation teams.
Innovation can include a range of activities from basic research, incremental improvements and optimized processes, to disruptive products and services, as well as new business models. Likewise, innovation returns come in a variety of forms – namely, increased revenue and decreased cost but also time/labor savings that can either be taken to the bottom line or be reinvested in new transformation projects. InnoMetrix’s primary means of calculating financial returns is through Return-on-Investment (ROI), Payback and Net Present Value (NPV). These metrics are provided at 3 levels of granularity which align with InnoMetrix’s hierarchy of Goals, Strategies and Initiatives.
At the most granular level, financial metrics are presented at the Initiative level. Initiatives (which are essentially projects) are planned and executed with human resources and/or capital investments. Depending on the scope and complexity of the Initiative, there can be multiple resource commitments. For each Initiative, users will see the estimated, expected (the estimated value multiplied by a probability factor) and actual returns.
At the next level, there are Strategies. The Strategy describes the approach taken to reach a goal. There are often multiple initiatives nested under a particular Strategy. Each unique Strategy has a more common strategy type. Examples of strategy types include automation, workforce optimization, new product development, etc. The returns from multiple Initiatives roll up not only to the Strategy but to the strategy type as well. Furthermore, all Initiatives that employ a particular strategy type will roll up to the type. In that way, one can see the performance impact of, for example, all initiatives that employ automation.
At the highest level is the Goal, where you establish the overarching objective and set the budget your organization is willing to invest in order to attain desired results. The financial metric data from all related Strategies and Initiatives roll up to the Goal level. This allows you to measure the performance impact of all activities against that specific Goal and its budget.
With finite financial and human resources, organizations need a better approach to planning and managing their innovation and transformation investments. They need to understand where their time and money delivers the highest returns, based on actual performance history. InnoMetrix puts all innovation management data in one Cloud-based solution to provide the insights companies need to guide their strategic investment decisions.