Success criteria

- [Narrator] When you're trying to solve a difficult, innovation problem, how do you know when you've hit upon the right idea? Do you have a gut feeling that you've simply learned to trust? Do you build a consensus feeling with everyone on your team? Or do you go with whatever the boss likes and yells, "Eureka!" Measuring innovation success is something that at some point almost everyone gets wrong. I want you to think about innovation as something which has clear and specific business metrics, in addition to key engineering specifications. What's the business problem that you're trying to solve? How does solving it benefit you and your customers? If you're a solution owner, both you and your entire team must know your innovation business model and it's related metrics. Or your efforts may amount to nothing. Now some of you may thinking, "hey, wait, I'm an engineer, I measure innovation with practical metrics. Things like weight, size, cycle times, position, voltages, pressures, lines of codes, useful things. Why do I have to worry about business metrics? Leave that to the executives." I hear you and believe me, I empathize with you. But what many organizations fail to appreciate in managing their innovation practices, are the inseparable relationships between engineering excellence and business requirements. Sacrifice one and the other invariably suffers. Sometimes with disastrous results. As recently seen in the commercial, Aviation sector. So how do you manage these relationships when planning and executing your innovation initiatives? Do your executives need a crash course on engineering? Will your engineers suddenly need ivy league MBAs? In the course of my work with hundreds of global product firms, I've developed a list of questions that I used to interview my client's teams before any work begins on a project. These questions are designed to get the entire team, engineers and executives thinking and talking about goals and objectives. And most importantly, to agree to a prioritize list of metrics. By which every implementation idea will be evaluated. For example, you might want to consider asking some of these questions. How long will the implementation take? How much will it cost? What level of innovation does it target? What are the related material costs? What are the related overhead costs? Does the proposed implementation leverage existing products? Does it leverage core competency? Does it present intellectual property challenges such as freedom to operate. Does it present regulatory challenges? Does it create competitive barriers? Does it leverage manufacturing capabilities? And perhaps the most important question, is it easy to use and adopt by customers? What applied is numeric scores to individual concepts. For example, a one to ten scale between bad to good. Answers to each of these and other questions form the basis of ranking strategies. It can be used to compare ideas objectively. This form of applying success criteria is one of the most power tools a team of innovators can use to keep the team honest, focus on the same goals and minimally impacted by subjective contaminates such as confirmation bias or ever present, "Hey! That's cool" factors.