I reecently saw in a Business Week Innovation blog a post about how WL Gore & Associates have set up a “Capability Center” at its Barksdale, Delaware site in order to show off it products and technologies. The new facility was opened last year and was designed with the help of design agencies Carbone Smolan, IDEO and Homsey Architects. It’s not just intended to be used as a way to sell to clients. Gore’s own business model means that the company’s thousands of employees (Associates?) are widely dispersed around the site. According to in interview with Gene Castellano, Project Director for the Capability Center “Bill Gore had ideas about organizational dynamics and as he evolved his company, he tried to maintain a culture that fostered small teams.” As a result of this, employees focus on individual businesses and are scattered across many buildings with little sense of the overall corporation. So the facility is also used to “sell” ideas and technologies internally, helping employees to think about novel applications and combinations of Gore technologies. I’ve seen a very similar approach at 3M where the periodic table of 3M technologies is showcased in a dedicated technology and innovation section of the UK 3M head office in Bracknell. Very impressive it was to especially when combined with the traditional 10% innovation time rule at 3M. Anyway, here are a couple of shots of the new facility at Gore to give you a flavour.

I’ve recently picked up in a Strategy and Business Innovation blog called Christiansarker.com and on Business Week that the old chestnut of whizzy ways to measure how innovative you are has come up again. This time, however, rather than a complex formula being promoted by an expensive and flashy Boston-based management consultancy, the proposal has come from good old British NESTA. They claim that the usual measures of innovativeness (is that a word?) related to R&D spend and number of patents are off the mark for financial institutions and other service based businesses (of which the UK economy has a quite a lot) and want to implement a range of measures related to training, organisational change and an industry-based “peer review in which company executives both help to define the innovation indicators and rate each other”. Hmm, well I reckon we’re all pretty innovative, don’t you agree chaps? Let’s give ourselves all a five out of five on that one.

I’m probably being hopelessly simplistic and niaive, but what’s wrong with some kind of vintage measure to assess innovation - you know, % of sales from products/services launched in the last year. You might need to set up some criteria to help define the word “new” but I reckon that’s a lot better than some kind of dodgy old boys club peer review. I think output measures are most useful when you’re trying to assess your true innovation impact, after all, if it doesn’t hit the bottom line, how can it really be innovation?