Membership Brainstorm on Monitoring & Measuring Innovation

A Membership Brainstorm – an 80% interactive format. Brainstorm sessions zero in on key areas of focus within a Council Critical Issue. Participants engage in spontaneous group discussion to generate ideas and problem-solve about shared challenges.

Topic: Monitoring & Measuring Innovation

Moderator:
Micah Fening
Innovation Product Management Director
Nationwide Financial

Abstract:
Join your fellow members in a brainstorming session exploring how to monitor and measure innovation from early learning through scaled impact. As a group, we will explore how to translate hypotheses, experiments, and evolving KPIs into a balanced view of customer value, operational excellence, financial strength, and the value of what we learn. We will start with time and productivity – the KPI most innovation teams can measure first – and discuss how to trace time saved to released capacity, cost avoidance or expense reduction, increased throughput, revenue generation, loss mitigation, and other business outcomes. We will also consider how adoption, engagement, confidence, customer/member satisfaction, and partner satisfaction can demonstrate whether an innovation is genuinely valuable.

Key Brainstorm Challenges

• Defining measures that evolve with the innovation. How do we connect what we know, what we believe, the experiment we will run, and the KPI or minimum success criterion that informs a proceed, pivot, or stop decision—while increasing measurement fidelity as the work progresses?
• Translating time savings into financial value (especially with AI innovation). How do we distinguish hours saved from realized cost reduction, cost avoidance, redeployed capacity, increased throughput, revenue growth, retention, or loss mitigation—and make the assumptions, scale dependencies, and attribution transparent?
• Measuring customer value alongside internal efficiency. How do we connect adoption and engagement to task success, customer confidence, CSAT, partner satisfaction, retention, and willingness to pay so that customer satisfaction is treated as a core outcome rather than a secondary check, or worse, a nice to have?