25 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top Overcoming the Pitfalls M ost managers are decidedly unhappy with the usefulness of their innovation dashboards for improving their innovation performance and better allocating resources. This frustration intensifies during uncertain times when resources become scarce and budgets are squeezed. Despite this frustration most firms seem content to use readily available metrics. Does convenience take precedence over insight? Why is there such a gap between what is needed for a useful dashboard to be useful and what is actually used? One reason is an unbalanced emphasis on flawed outcome measures that are far removed from the management choices and trade-off. Another is a desire to have just a small number of metrics to keep managers focused on a few strategic priorities. This research study and Mack Institute best practice enquiries offer three lessons that can help bridge the gap between need and practice. Lesson One: Emphasize Learning Over Score-Keeping It is essential to know whether the innovation investments and processes are delivering results. So, performance outcome measures such as revenue and profit growth from new products, customer satisfaction and new product suc- cess rates must be in the innovation dashboard. But score-keeping measures don’t yield actionable insights into what is working or not working. Were the poor results due to inadequate or unreliable inputs, or a cumbersome and slow stage-gate process that stalled projects? Were too many small projects absorbing scarce resources and creating traffic jams in the development process? A good starting place is to shift the balance away from score-keeping toward input and intermediate process effectiveness measures. But which measures are more useful? In our experience few companies are short of ideas—the real problem is a lack of ideas that are worth pursuing. Insightful metrics will