Last friday the Freakonomics blog had an interesting post - How Can We Measure Innovation? A Freakonomics Quorum. It’s of one of those timeless questions, and generally if you ask ten different people you will get ten different answers. Thanksfully, Freakonomics only asked six, and one if them is John Seely Brown, a long-time friend of ours. Brown provides the argument for segmenting three different types of innovation – incremental, architectural, and distruptive – which pretty much kills the hopes for the incrementally distruptive architectural innovation I came up with last week. Different metrics can be used for each, as he discusses, and as you can imagine disruptive are the most interesting.

Here’s a quick recap of the others: Seth Godin… well his answer is a little more philisophical. I’d summarize it as ”the answer to this question is that the question is wrong, you won’t know it until it’s already happened, and it pays even when it doesn’t so do it. Gooooo, innovation.” Professor Asish Arora alludes back to Joseph Schumpeter, and makes a number of other impressive economic and historic references… and then ends up back at “I know it when I see it” to define innovation, and that Innovation is simply to complex for a single summary measure. Kwon and Hildebot twist the innovation question around to focus on the value of failures. While some loose references are made in regards to what to watch (failure rates, ensuring you are on the right failure path, examining the sources), there’s no real meat there in terms of measurement. Mark Turrell is the final respondent, and actually gets back to the measurement issue more directly – he’s got a few interesting ones after he works through discrediting some others, and then finishes up by reminding people that they need targets for… whatever it is they are measuring.

So if one was to summarize the entire quorum, it seems that most of the respondents have cleverly dodged the main question – how can we measure innovation – and instead focused on what, why, where, and when. This is not uncommon, as the how is exceedingly difficult to articulate – and for many the other aspects are far more interesting. Might the right answer be that, just like innovation itself, we’ll only know the right measure when we see it?