29 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top management spotlights technology in public statements. Such statements attract innovation talent by expressing what the company values. For instance, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s 2008 shareholder letter only mentioned technology once, but the most recent letter mentioned it 21 times, one leader noted during the Mack Institute conference on innovation metrics, “So as a bank, we have recognized, and the leadership has bought into the idea, that technology is the beginning of innovation.” Lesson Three: Put More Discipline Into the Innovation Culture To have accountability for innovation results the culture has to be supportive of innovation metrics. But notions of accountability and measurement rub many executives the wrong way. Eric Schmidt, when he was the CEO of Goo- gle believed that trying to measure his firm’s innovation process would choke it off entirely. At the extreme this view is expressed as “the more you measure and motivate the less likely you will have a truly innovation culture.” Our findings refuted the notion that an emphasis on metrics is inimical to innovation and growth. If anything, the converse is more accurate. This con- clusion is based on an analysis of the variables that best discriminated high versus low growth performers (in terms of their rate of organic growth relative to competitors over the past five years). The significant discriminators were: first, spending on innovation relative to the spending of major competitors, second, whether the culture was supportive toward the use of innovation metrics, and third, whether the innovation metrics were effectively aligned with individual performance incentives.22 There should be a healthy tension between the creative risk taking and ex- perimentation part of the innovation culture, and the disciplined, rigorous and 22 These relationships were significant with a probability of less than .02 in the database of 1,075 com- panies.