Measured Success: By The Numbers

Sept. 12, 2008

Customer satisfaction is a popular metric by which to gauge the success of innovation efforts. But it's not the only one.

Jill Jusko

Many things about innovation frustrate executives, not the least of which is how best to gauge the success of their innovation efforts. As Boston Consulting Group's annual global survey of innovation illustrates, companies are relying on a variety of metrics to determine the success of innovation. Customer satisfaction was identified by the most firms as a key metric, garnering nods from half the survey respondents. What follows are the top five most popular metrics and the percentage of firms using them.

54 percentage of companies that use customer satisfaction to measure the success of their
innovation

47 percentage of companies that use percentage of sales from new offerings to measure their innovation success

44 percentage that use overall revenue growth as a measure of innovation success

32 percentage that identify increased margins as a measure of the success of their innovation

25 percentage that say number of new products or services is a measure of innovation success

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About the Author

Jill Jusko

Bio: Jill Jusko is executive editor for IndustryWeek. She has been writing about manufacturing operations leadership for more than 20 years. Her coverage spotlights companies that are in pursuit of world-class results in quality, productivity, cost and other benchmarks by implementing the latest continuous improvement and lean/Six-Sigma strategies. Jill also coordinates IndustryWeek’s Best Plants Awards Program, which annually salutes the leading manufacturing facilities in North America.

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