On measuring open innovation

Open innovation, in layman's words, is when organisations accept external ideas and use external resources to develop their own ideas. It comes in many flavours, such as crowdsourcing, user innovation, coopetition, M&A, corporate venture capital (CVC), and so on.

As always, measuring the performance of such innovation vehicles is still important. The worst thing you could do is continue unloading money on something that doesn't work. My friend and collaborator, Dan Toma, recently published a series of posts offering a number of measures for:

• free and paid pilots,
• M&A projects, and
• corporate venture capital.

Use above alongside my four-step process to design metrics that matters the most to you. And remember—the purpose of these measures is to signal when a change is needed! Don't waste your time if you plan to ignore them, or even worse, use them as fancy wallpaper.