6 Metrics for Managing Innovation: Lessons From Growth Leaders ^Top How Whirlpool Became an Innovator and Transformed an Industry W hen then Chairman and CEO of the company, David Whitwam looked ahead in 1999, he anticipated a possible stalemate in the major appliance industry, with shrinking differentiation, downward price pressures and anemic organic growth.7 To address the underlying “ocean- of-white” syndrome (the mass of confusingly similar boxes confronting a prospective buyer entering an appliance store), he and his leadership team committed to escaping this “commodity trap” by developing a new set of capabilities for continuously innovating Whirlpool products. The leadership team articulated a strategic vision and outlined a desired future narrative for Whirlpool. Historically, Whirlpool’s innovation efforts relied upon engineering and marketing to generate and develop their new product concepts and feature innovations. Whitwam envisioned a Whirlpool in which “Innovation would generate from everyone and from everywhere.” Realizing this vision would mean creating a new innovation narrative at Whirlpool, which in turn would require a broad-based organizational change. To overcome Whirlpool’s siloed approach to innovation, the leadership would have to equip as many employ- ees as possible with tools for identifying latent customer needs and emerging technologies, and then combine them into innovative new offerings. For start- ers, ideas were solicited from all of Whirlpool’s 61,000 employees. Whirlpool created a set of metrics that were distributed throughout the com- pany and included an emphasis on the innovation goal of a $1 billion addition 7 The Whirlpool change process is described in J.W. Rivkin, D. Leonard, and G. Hamel, “Change at Whirlpool Corporation (B),” Harvard Business School case 9-705-463, (March 2006): N. T. Snyder and Dr. I., Duarte Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry, (New York: Jossey-Bass 2008); G. Hamel and N. Tennant, “The 5 Requirements of a Truly Innovative Company,” Harvard Business Review, (April 27, 2015), and D. Dependable Results,” Business Strategy Series, 10/2 (2009).