There is a concept from marketing measurement and ROI that compares and contrasts working and non-working dollars. The new media folks don't like it too much, but I suspect that has something do with being measured by folks that don't get it. The concept asks the simple question:
Are we spending our money on and close to our customers?
Let's steal it for innovation.
Non-working dollars are those that are spent on planning, thinking about planning, strategy, and measuring (that's ironic), etc. Working dollars are those that have the potential to influence the customer more directly.
For innovation, influence is important, but so is learning and direct experimentation.
Ensuring that most of the work that you're doing has a chance to result in learning or influence is a good idea. More effort should be spent on prototyping, sharing ideas with users, listening to them directly and designing earlier. If you're living in beta, your ratio would be pretty high. Let's say that for every hour of non-influence and non-learning, you should have two hours of influence and learning:
IWD > 2.0
It seems like a "good" measure. It scales; you can apply it to an organization or a project or a day. It promotes the right behavior; measuring IWD will likely result in more of the right things done, faster.
If you compared your working and non-working innovation dollars, what would you find?
(Note: I'm going to start sharing ideas on Innovation Measures. There are lots of things written about what makes a good measure. The writing on innovation measures so far says a lot of stuff like: there are no silver bullets, the right number is about seven, input/outcome/process, etc. I'm going to try to make, steal or adapt some bullets. I'll probably write stuff that others have already conceived. I'm ok with that, but apologize in advance if it's your stuff.)
Creative Commons image from HJEM's Flickr Stream.
