I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.
The Freakonomics blog has this from Ashish Arora at Carnegie Mellon:
Innovation can be measured by the additional profit it generates and expressed as a return on the investments made for that purpose. At the level of the industry or even economy as a whole, economists use the concept of “total factor productivity,” which captures a similar idea.
But this is a cop out.
Arora says this is measuring innovation, rather than measuring the impact of innovation — what’s important to him is the end result. Seth Godin, earlier in the same piece, argues that the focus should be on the means rather than the end — organisations shouldn’t think of innovation as something they can buy; rather, they need to put in place structures to support the process of innovation.
Contradictory? No — Arora argues that at a societal level what’s important is the study of the impact of innovation; an impact which may take a long time to emerge, and which is unlikely to be fully understood from the outset. Setting this impact as a metric by which to evaluate the process of innovation itself is likely to be fruitless for this very reason.
Ashish Arora, economics, Freakonomics, innovation, investment, Seth Godin, Total Factor Productivity
I’m an entrepreneurial twenty three year old, part of the team at we are social, a conversation agency based in London.
On this site, I blog mainly about communication, design, technology and the arts, and their impact on society. I also write the Skype blog.
The process vs outcome debate is an interesting one and seems to be rearing it’s head in so many things I see and read at the moment.
For innovation, we did some work last year with small businesses in London about defining what innovation meant for them, people who are having to innovate to stay in business. The outcome was a nice balance of both process and outcome - “doing things differently” (a process element) and “to make more money” (a clear outcome).
I personally think that outcomes are to some extent easier to measure and that might bias some people’s preference for using them as a definition.
More info on our survey is here: http://blog.freshnetworks.com/?p=61