We measure everything – why not measure innovation as well? | SparcIt Creativity Psychometric Assessment

We measure everything – why not measure innovation as well?

We, at SparcIt, we have tools to measure different aspect of the company’s technical factors.

We run our application on Google Cloud.  We use Google Cloud’s monitoring tools, NewRelic and Nagios to monitor the servers, measure the uptime, throughput and memory usage.  We also use Rollbar to catch exceptions and errors in the log files.  And these are just the ones I know about.  I’m sure our developers use other tools that I don’t know nor heard about before.

We use Hubspot to capture leads, monitor the number of daily visitors, how many visitors watched the videos, read this blog post or other whitepapers.  We use ConstantContact for email marketing and we use Zoho CRM for customer relation management.  Lastly, we use Bing and Google Alerts to capture any news that mention our name anywhere.

We are a small company.  So, we don’t use any Talent Management system yet.  But we use SparcIt and Foursights to measure one’s innovative thinking abilities.   That sums up the external tools we use.

Besides SparcIt and Foursights, all the other tools are to measure technical factors.  Our investors ask for the numbers on these technical factors.  But SparcIt’s biggest asset is its employees.  Every single one of them is putting immense # of hours, work very passionately and are very dedicated to SparcIt’s cause.  My co-founder for example, rejected an offer of over $250K per year to work at SparcIt.

We are just one example.  Organizations are great at measuring technical factors.  But we rarely measure or even attempt to quantify non-technical factors.

So, why are we not investing more in our employees? Research has shown that innovative employees do affect the bottom-line. Why are we not trying to make them more innovative and why are we not measuring innovations in organizations?

A new research by IBM shows that, organizations like to innovate, but they primarily focus on maintaining the current status quo. But why?

Is it because new innovation is risky? With the budget cuts, most organizations are just attempting to maintain their status and not to innovate.

Is it because innovation focuses on employees’ abilities and put the spotlight (and pressure) on them? Hence they need to push themselves, get out of their comfort zone and be more innovative?  I don’t think that’s the case.  Most employees enjoy training classes and do want to learn new skills or learn more about themselves.  But they do not enjoy doing survey-style questionnaires.  Personally, if I ever run into any types of assessment, I take it.  I’m always curious to both learn about myself and also understand how that assessment works.  But if the assessment is a set of multiple-choice question and takes more than 5 minutes, I probably will not complete it. But what if, we create game-like assessments where it engages and encourages the participants to think and produce.  Then, I believe participants will be interested.

To innovate and to improve, we should :

  • Measure the employees’ creativity and innovative thinking – in most cases, employees like to learn more about themselves and understands their strengths and areas for improvement.  (Note: Create a link where people could take a set of tests).
  • Measure # of ideas submitted by people in 30 or 60 day periods – research shows that the more ideas we generate, the higher the likely-hood of generating one that is break-through.  At SparcIt, in our biweekly company meetings, all employees are required to generate and submit ideas for product and process improvement.  It doesn’t mean it get implemented.  But they are definitely heard.
  • Spend at least 5% of your time on innovation and cutting-edge projects – at SparcIt, since we are a small organization, we definitely spend more than 5% of our time and energy on this. This is not only beneficial for the organization, but it also keeps all of us engaged.
  • Have a list of all ideas for new product/process or improvements to existing ones in the company portal – At SparcIt, all suggestions and ideas are put in our company portal.  And of course, everyone can chip in and comment on them.

HR managers, hiring managers and leaders in organizations; I invite you to share your opinion: With all the budget cuts, what do you do to encourage innovation in your organizations?


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