A dark art no more

“WHAT matters gets measured.” That is one of the basic tenets of corporate strategy taught at business schools. As driving growth through innovation is today at the top of corporate agendas you would expect to find managers treating it like a science. After all, manufacturing philosophies such as “total-quality management” (a process of continuous improvement) and “Six Sigma” (which uses statistical methods to eliminate variations and defects) were quantified and widely deployed a long time ago, often with good results.

Yet innovation remains a frustratingly fuzzy notion. Many bosses think it is essentially a creative process. Some anoint “chief innovation officers”, bring in consultancies or set up secret “skunk works” to tease out the ideas they fear their own bureaucracy might squash. One senior executive maintains that innovation simply cannot be defined exactly, but that “like pornography I know it when I see it.”