How to Track Progress of your Innovation Projects in a Simple and Effective Way

Robbert van Geldrop, Chief Venturing Officer at Firmhouse, suggests that the key metric for measuring progress in innovation projects is Assumptions Tested. When teams in innovation projects produce learnings at a slower speed, it might indicate that the team's innovation project has waste. The aim is to produce low amounts of assumptions tested to reduce waste. Through this metric, teams can identify bottlenecks in the project, discover which types of experiments take a long time for teams to complete, and invest in tools to resolve the issues. This approach to measuring progress is similar to what startups did many years ago, by using Innovation Accounting to measure success. By measuring the Assumptions Tested metric, teams can determine which parts of the business model are affected by the outcomes of the project. Lastly, this metric can aggregate and serve as an indicator of how much insight companies gather about new markets, opportunities, customer segments, and value propositions.