Despite the current financial goings on and general tightening of the purse strings, I don’t think there has been a better time to start having a bit of a tinkle with your metrics and if Tim Brown of IDEO says it, it must be true.
I’m a believer that you are what you measure and if that only happens to be things like sales, reach, frequency and recall it’s unlikely that you will get very far on the innovation front. In fact you are essentially just counting stuff, which is fine when things are going well, but doesn’t help you work out what to do when things aren’t quite so rosy.
I completely agree that we tend to measure outputs, rather than outcomes. The logic model (http://alignment.wordpress.com/2008/09/28/logic-model/) tries to codify this so that we use performance management to focus on impact. As far as measuring innovation, some thoughts here:
http://alignment.wordpress.com/2008/11/02/measuring-innovation/
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