We Need to Measure Innovation Better. Here's How

Innovation drives productivity, and productivity is what drives jobs growth and the wealth that pays for our health, education, defense, and social security systems. In short, innovation really matters.

In the past it was possible to identify innovation within particular organizations, teams, or individuals; nowadays innovation is more often networked among multiple contributors, which complicates its measurement. Collecting data on innovation is hampered by the desire to ensure indicators are simple, easily accessible, comparable across nations, and cheap to acquire and compute.

There is value in including insights from behavioral science. Ideas for new services, the largest component of modern economies, occur at the point of consumption. This means the behaviors of consumers and ‘user innovators matter more and more. Furthermore, as AI and automation replace repetitive work, and human attributes such as creativity, intuition and empathy become more important, understanding behaviors around innovation becomes crucial.