27 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top to look for bottlenecks, resource constraints and bureaucratic delays that cause the goals to be missed. A useful further step is to bench-mark key metrics in the dashboard against direct competitors as well as peer companies in similar industries that are non-competitive. This kind of bench-marking exercise is a valuable tool for understanding more deeply the chosen metrics, and might suggest others that would better motivate the organization. However, as we discuss in the next section, there is a limit to how much one can learn from others. Lesson Two: Customize the Dashboard One size does not fit all firms and there are no “silver bullet” metrics. Instead a useful innovation dashboard satisfies three requirements. First it reflects the strategic priorities of the business and is customized for the market. What is useful for a biosciences firm with lengthy development cycles won’t apply to a packaged goods firm—and vice versa. Second it gives a holistic picture of the entire innovation process and, third, it accepts the reality that all metrics are flawed and susceptible to gaming. Thus, a good metrics dashboard yields insights through a process of triangulation where several metrics taken to- gether yield a fuller picture. Firms can customize their innovation dashboards by choosing from a menu of metrics among the standard possibilities, and then adding specialized metrics that are customized to the innovation strategy. Most companies limit themselves to the available menu approach: only 6 percent used measures of inputs and process effectiveness other than the ones we gave them, and 2 percent used other measures of performance. Contrast the typical menu picking approach with the rigor that best practice companies apply to developing the metrics for their dashboards. These firms treat it as a research question and ask: Which metrics give the most useful