15 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top How Do Innovation Metrics Contribute to Innovation Performance? A ddressing this issue is complicated by the number of possible prescriptions that companies can use to improve their innovation performance. These range from: change the incentives, listen to the “voice of the customers,” reorganize to become ambidextrous, learn to think like a start-up, and many more. We undertook a thorough survey of industry best practices and can- vassed the literature15 to identify 18 different prescriptions for innova- tion drivers and then saw whether they could explain differences in organic growth rates (relative to their industry peers) in a sample of 192 companies from diverse industries. We needed variance in the measures of the key constructs, which is difficult to achieve in single industry studies, even when a significant portion of industry players are surveyed. Surveys are also suited to this research question, as most of the constructs do not have objective and accessible referent. 15 An illustrative sampling of the sources we examined include: Edward D. Hess, Smarter Growth: Build- ing an Enduring Business by Managing the Risks of Growth, Columbia Business School Publishing, 2010; V. Govindarajan and Chris Trimble, Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution, Harvard Busi- ness Press, 2005; Michael L. Tushman and Charles A. O’Reilly, Winning Through Innovation: A Practical Guide to Leading Organizational Change and Renewal, Harvard Business School Press, 1997; Clayton M. Christensen and Michael T. Raynor, The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Innovation, McKinsey Quarterly, April 2015; Michael Schrage, The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments are Worth More than Good Ideas, The MIT Press, 2014. We undertook a thorough survey of industry best practices and canvassed the literature to identify 18 different prescriptions for innovation drivers.