Solverboard Enterprise and Solverboard Partner were created to help organisations engage all their people in the business of innovation and build a culture of innovation, whether just internally or throughout their innovation eco-system. And our newest feature – Solverboard Analytics – now makes it possible to gauge how well you’re doing with this ambition.
As any manager can tell you, it’s very difficult to measure a culture. But Solverboard Analytics helps you find out more about your organisation’s propensity to innovate and the outcomes generated, making it easier for Innovation and R&D managers to manage their portfolio and demonstrate the value of innovation.
Because the Analytics feature is built into the fabric of Solverboard, all users of the platform can access useful and relevant data, from information about individuals’ own contributions to challenges or how well their own challenge is doing, all the way up to data across all challenges and solutions for Innovation Managers.
Solverboard Analytics allows you to measure innovation success on the Solverboard platform on four key elements: Engagement, People, Quality and Value.
Engagement gives you an indication of your organisation’s propensity to innovate by showing how engaged and reliable its members are, as well as your network’s size, connectedness and diversity. An engaged innovation community will indicate a positive and mature innovation culture.
People allows you to see how well connected and active individuals in your network are, as well as identify talent and engagement in particular members. It does this through team scores as well as individual leaderboards, provides an assessment and rates the talent of the people engaging with innovation in your business – e.g. what scores have their Solutions received, how often do they comment or discuss Challenges, which teams in your business produce the most Solutions.
Quality helps you move beyond the quantitative measures of numbers of Challenges and Solutions to understand the quality of the engagement with innovation in your organisation. Quality focuses on measures such as how well solutions fit the challenges, how satisfied Solvers feel with the Challenges themselves, which Challenges are performing well (and which are not), and which Solvers are producing high quality solutions.
Finally, Value helps you focus on the ultimate aim of innovation – the creation of value. By combining measures of potential benefits with likelihoods of success, the Value measure helps you estimate the value of innovations received through Solverboard to your organisation, over the short and the long term.
All of these measures can be viewed through our clear, visually appealing dashboard, and you can drill down into each measure and see how it has changed over time, making it really easy to see whether your efforts to build an innovation culture are paying off. You can identify innovation superstars, encourage healthy competition among your people, and reward hard work. Furthermore, you can see which of your innovation challenges is attracting the most attention, and which ones might need to be re-thought in order to get those creative juices flowing.
“Talking to our customers we found that one of their biggest struggles was measuring innovation activity – we know that not every innovation makes it to market, and that failure is a big part of trying anything new, so measuring on final outcomes never tells the whole story” says our founder Phil. “We designed Solverboard Analytics to help Innovation Managers measure, understand and report on the levels of innovation in their organisation in a robust manner.”