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Missed last week's edition of Beyond the Core? Read it here.
Most corporate innovation metrics fall into three traps:
The key is to build innovation systems that are tied to strategy and grounded in reality. That means tracking what matters based on where a venture is in its journey and what kind of system it’s in.
We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all dashboards. We do believe in better ways to measure progress.
Good metrics:
If a metric isn’t helping you do one of those, it’s probably noise.
Before picking a metric, ask: What is your innovation system actually designed to deliver?
Misalignment here is where most measurement systems break down.
Don’t track culture change with startup metrics.
Don’t evaluate disruptive bets using core business KPIs.
Instead, define a small set of goals per horizon and per venture stage, and then choose metrics that answer: Are we learning what we need to learn to justify the next level of investment?
(From Lean Analytics, adapted for corporate innovation)
To track venture progress, we use a five-stage model from Lean Analytics, co-authored by our Founding Partner, Ben Yoskovitz. We’ve adapted it to help teams focus on the right signals at the right time and avoid scaling too early.
Have we identified a real, urgent, poorly met need?
If you’re in Empathy and your metric is revenue, you’re skipping the part where you find out if anyone truly cares.
Do users want this enough to keep using it?
Here, conversion alone isn’t enough. You need to prove people will come back, finish the job, and complain if you take the solution away.
Are users spreading it organically?
Virality at this stage isn’t “we went viral on social once.” It’s repeatable behaviour where your users start to do part of the distribution work for you. You need to prove you can acquire customers in a (at least somewhat) repeatable way.
Can this business make money?
The goal is not “perfect” economics on Day 1, but proof that the business can work and that you know where the levers are.
Can this become meaningful over time?
At Scale, you start to care about portfolio-level questions: contribution to growth, cannibalization, and how this changes the shape of the business over 3–5 years.
Each stage comes with its own evidence.
That’s what drives smart decisions not checklists.
The most important question becomes: Have we earned the right to move to the next stage?
We’ve seen what doesn’t work, and we stay away from it:
Holding early-stage bets to late-stage ROI timelines
If a metric can be gamed without creating value, someone will eventually game it. Design metrics that are hard to hit without actually making progress.
To summarize: Good metrics create clarity.They support decision-making, not just reporting. They help teams move, learn, and earn the right to keep going.
The real test of your innovation metrics is simple:
If not, the metrics might look impressive on a slide but they probably suck.
