28: Expected Value - Act 1 Chapter 1

After a summer break, welcome back to season three of the pod. It's going to be a special season. I recently launched my latest book, Expected Value: The System to Prove, Measure, and Scale Value. And thanks to our sponsor Wazoku, across this season, you'll hear the full audio version of the book. It's a story, a system, and a toolkit designed to finally answer the question that every innovator faces. How do we prove, measure, and scale the value of the innovation work that we do? Each episode takes you chapter by chapter through the book, exclusively for Total Innovation Podcast subscribers, and before the full audiobook release later this year. 

In this opening episode, we set the stage for the system that redefines how innovation is measured. You'll hear the forward, the introduction to Act One, The Problem with Innovation Performance, and Chapter One, The Innovation Illusion, where we meet Freya and her team as they confront the uncomfortable truth about why so much innovation fails to perform. 

Transcript

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What's up? Uh-uh.

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Uh-uh. Uh-uh. What's up, uh-uh, uh-uh.

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Welcome to the Total Innovation Podcast. As always, I'm your host, Simon Hill. After a summer break, welcome back to season three of the pod. Thanks as always to our sponsor Wizoku, and due to them, it's going to be a special season. I recently launched my latest book, Expected Value: The System to Prove, Measure, and Scale Value. And thanks to Wizoku, across this season, you'll hear the full audio version of the book. It's a story, a system, and a toolkit designed to finally answer the question that every innovator faces. How do we prove, measure, and scale the value of the innovation work that we do? Each episode takes you chapter by chapter through the book, exclusively for Total Innovation Podcast subscribers, and before the full audiobook release later this year. So wherever you are, walking, working, or just wondering how to make innovation truly perform, settle in and let's explore expected value together. In this opening episode, we set the stage for the system that redefines how innovation is measured. You'll hear the forward, the introduction to Act One, The Problem with Innovation Performance, and Chapter One, The Innovation Illusion, where we meet Freya and her team as they confront the uncomfortable truth about why so much innovation fails to perform. Enjoy.

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We've been counting all the pilots, posting metrics on the wall. But when the CFO is asking, where's the value in it all?

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TLDR summary. Innovation isn't broken. The way we measure it is. Yet most organizations are drowning in pilots, hackathons, and idea portals. While unable to answer the two questions that matter, what's the value of all this? And what's it costing us to create that value? The fundamental problem. We've been obsessed with outputs and activity, tracking vanity metrics like ideas submitted and engagement levels, when what we need is a system that measures outcomes, confidence, real impact, and the efficiency of creating it. This book introduces that system. It's called Expected Value X V, which equals confidence multiplied by predicted value multiplied by time sensitivity multiplied by strategic fit. And innovation efficiency which builds on XV. Gives us the cost per XV point which equals investment divided by expected value. Expected value combines. A dynamic scoring model XV that evolves with learning. An efficiency lens that transforms innovation economics. A company filter strategic fit that ensures alignment and advantage. A portfolio lens that shows true vitality across life cycles. A governance framework that distributes decisions without losing accountability. This isn't just another framework, it's a language, a logic, and a leadership tool designed to transform innovation from an expensive black box into a performance system, delivering measurable value at radical efficiency. If you're tired of innovation theatre, if you want better bets, better data, better decisions at ten times less cost, if you believe innovation deserves a seat at the grown up table with CFO friendly economics. This is the system. This is the book. Who is this book for? This book is written for anyone who has felt the frustration of seeing innovation treated as a sideshow rather than a strategic discipline, and for those ready to change that dynamic. While the ideas within these pages can benefit organizations of any size, these readers will find particular value. CFOs and finance leaders who want innovation to meet the same standards of accountability as other business functions. You're not against innovation, you simply need visibility, confidence metrics, and strategic alignment before committing resources. This book gives you the framework to have productive conversations with innovation teams without stifling creativity. CEOs and executive teams seeking to make innovation a competitive advantage rather than a buzzword. You've invested in innovation infrastructure but struggle to see the return. You need innovation that drives strategic outcomes, not just interesting experiments. Innovation leaders and managers who are tired of defending their work with activity metrics and anecdotes. You know your team is creating value but struggle to make it visible to the rest of the business. You've mastered creativity and ideation, but now need the language and tools to demonstrate impact in terms the C-suite respects. Chief innovation officers and heads of RD who need to transform their function from a cost center to a value engine. You're responsible for portfolio decisions that balance exploration and exploitation and need a system that can both guide those choices and defend them to stakeholders. Portfolio and product managers who must balance multiple initiatives across different horizons and risk profiles. You're looking for structured ways to make trade-offs and sequence investments for maximum impact. Entrepreneurs and change agents navigating complex corporate environments to bring new ideas to life. You need tools to build credibility, secure resources, and demonstrate progress in a language decision makers understand. Strategy teams responsible for aligning innovation efforts with enterprise priorities. You see the disconnection between strategic plans and innovation activities and need a bridge between these worlds. Corporate venture teams evaluating early stage opportunities with limited data. You need more than gut feel to make investment decisions, but traditional ROI metrics don't work for nascent innovations. Innovation consultants and advisors seeking frameworks that can create lasting impact beyond the initial engagement. You need approaches that clients can operationalize after you leave. Leaders navigating digital transformation who must evaluate AI and emerging technology investments where the payoff is uncertain but potentially massive. You need ways to think about value that accommodate both high uncertainty and high potential. Whether you're defending an innovation budget, making portfolio decisions, or trying to shift your organization's relationship with uncertainty, the expected value system provides the language, logic, and tools to elevate innovation from theatre to performance. This book is not for those seeking quick fixes or innovation theatre. It's for leaders committed to the disciplined, sometimes challenging work of creating real value through innovation and proving it. Forward. I wrote this book out of frustration, not frustration with innovation teams, they are some of the most passionate, smart, and committed people I have worked with. The frustration is with the system, or more accurately, the lack of one. For more than a decade I have worked alongside innovation leaders inside global companies, startups, governments, and everything in between. Time and again brilliant work falls apart, not because the ideas were not good, but because very few know how to talk about value in a way that speaks to the business as the business works. This disconnect between data and decision making is not unique to corporate innovation. In sports analytics, teams learn that sophisticated metrics are worthless unless they inform real decisions in real time. Having the best data in the world is of little use if the signals are not translated for managers, coaches, scouts, and players. Corporate innovation faces the same challenge, at greater scale and with higher stakes. It is not enough to have better measurements. We need better interfaces between those measurements and the human systems they are designed to serve. This is not a minor issue, it is an existential threat. In boardrooms across every industry the same scene plays out with alarming regularity. Ideas get stuck in limbo, projects are quietly shut down. Teams spend months on strategic pilots only to be asked, usually far too late. What's the impact? Pilots freeze and fade into the myths of time. Often no one made a bad call, we simply never gave teams the tools to answer that critical question. Or we told them the answer didn't matter until it did. The problem has intensified. Digital transformation compressed timelines, then AI turned months into weeks when it comes to speed of delivery and cycle times. Executives expect faster results and bigger breakthroughs while most teams still carry the same inadequate metrics, idea counts, engagement statistics, and the occasional success story. We treat innovation like it is special, as if the normal rules do not apply, we track activity, celebrate culture, and showcase bright ideas. When it comes to performance we look away or make it someone else's problem. That is the illusion that innovation is working because everyone is busy and the funnel looks full. Until it is not, the funding stops, the breaks go on, and the cycle repeats. Activity is not impact. Outputs are not outcomes. Having more ideas is not the same thing as creating more value. A note on open innovation. Before we go further, let me ground a term you will see throughout this book open innovation. By open innovation I mean a governed and auditable practice of orchestrating external knowledge and capabilities from customers, partners, suppliers, universities, startups, independent experts, and crowds into your system to accelerate learning, reduce cost, and increase value creation. Done well, it is not outsourcing, and it is not a free for all. It is strategic design, clear problem framing, decision rights, intellectual property rules, evidence gates, and portfolio governance. Why ground it here? Because open approaches are now a primary driver of innovation efficiency, the cost to deliver one dollar of realized value. Across many settings, open innovation has been associated with meaningful cost reductions and faster development times when compared with closed research and development. The practical point is simple. The new competition is not who spends the most, it is who converts each unit of spend into the most validated learning and value. In our work, we have seen open approaches deliver ten to twenty times efficiency advantages over conventional methods, the same expected value for a fraction of the spend. In these pages, open innovation sits inside the same governance and measurement frame as everything else. It is a route to value, not a sideshow. You will see it used deliberately to lower costs per XV point, to compress time to evidence, and to de-risk decisions whether through partner ecosystems, startup sourcing, or challenge-driven problem solving. The results can be dramatic, including sustained productivity gains in research and development and repeated reductions in time to market when the external route is the right route. My journey to expected value. As an entrepreneur and CEO of Wazoku, I have had a front row seat to the innovation struggles of organizations worldwide. I have seen the cycle repeat, enthusiasm, disappointment, budget cuts, then a new wave of initiatives, each carrying the quiet hope that this time will be different. One moment crystallized it. A global financial services company had invested millions, thousands of ideas, dozens of pilots, plenty of buzz. Then headwinds hit and the CFO asked a simple question, what has this delivered to our bottom line? The team had stories and activity metrics, but no system for answering the real question. That experience pushed me to finish this book. I collected stories across sectors, studied how different organizations tried to measure innovation value, and looked outside business to disciplines with more mature measurement systems, sports analytics, risk management, and portfolio theory. Over time something took shape, not just a metric, but a system for treating innovation with the same seriousness as any other business function. As innovators we have spent years scaling engagement and activity. We need to start scaling impact and value. The expected value system. Expected value is the book I wish I had on day one, a system for treating innovation like a real business function, with its own logic, language and rhythm. A system you can run, measure, improve, and defend. At the center is a dynamic model XV that assesses an innovation by combining four factors confidence, the maturity of the evidence. Predicted value, the monetary value if successful, typically over three years. Time sensitivity, the urgency and the window of opportunity. Strategic fits the alignment with capabilities, advantages and direction. Expected value equals confidence multiplied by predicted value multiplied by time sensitivity multiplied by strategic fit. Around this course sits an operating system. Xfin efficiency to show the cost of delivering one dollar of realized value and to compare development routes on equal footing. The Vitality Index to track the portfolio contribution across life cycles. A culture of telemetry, kill credits, and performance storytelling because innovation does not live in metrics alone. This is not about replacing your process, it is about making it work. This is how we move from theatre to performance and from potential to proof. I am not a theorist, I am a practitioner. This book is built on years of scars, client work, boardroom debates, and one too many postmortems on what might have been. The book unfolds in four acts. Act one, the problem with innovation performance, exposes the disconnect between activity and value. We meet Freya, an innovation leader caught in the gap, and explore why traditional metrics fail. Act two, building a system that measures. What matters introduces the tools of the expected value system, XV and XV efficiency. You will learn how to implement them to bring structure and visibility to decisions. Act three Total Portfolio Intelligence moves beyond individual ideas to the system level. You will discover how to govern a balanced portfolio and create feedback loops for continuous learning and dynamic resourcing. Act four. Building a total innovation culture addresses the human side of measurement. Without the right mindsets, even the best metrics fail. You will meet Freya, her brother Axel, and others along the way. Their story is fictional, but everything in it is based on real world experience, sometimes a little dramatized. You will recognise the pressure, the politics, the quiet wins, the big setbacks. After all, innovation is human before it is strategic. If you have ever struggled to prove innovation's worth, if you have felt like the numbers you needed did not exist, if you are ready to move beyond the funnel and start scaling impact, if you want a system that tracks value, not vanity, then this book is for you. Let us begin and thank you for reading Simon Hill. A note on structure and style. This book is intentionally designed with a dual narrative approach to make complex concepts both accessible and applicable. As you read, the narrative alternates between two complementary styles. Narrative sections follow the journey of Freya, an innovation leader, and her brother Axel, a data scientist as they develop and implement the expected value system. These chapters bring the concepts to life through realistic scenarios, challenges, and breakthroughs that mirror what you might experience in your own organization. While Freya, Axel, and their colleagues are fictional characters, their experiences are composites, drawn from real situations I've encountered across many organizations. Conceptual sections provide the analytical foundation, practical frameworks, and implementation guidance. These chapters dive deeper into the concepts introduced in the narrative, offering clear explanations, step by step approaches, and examples you can adapt to your context. The key characters Throughout the narrative you'll meet several individuals who represent different perspectives on innovation and its measurement. Freya, director of innovation strategy and transformation at Nexus Global, a mid-sized financial services firm. Passionate and methodical, Freya is determined to transform innovation from theatre to performance with measurable results. Her journey to create the expected value system forms the central narrative of the book. Axel, Freya's younger brother and a brilliant data scientist with expertise in sports analytics. His insight into measuring expected outcomes rather than just results becomes the catalyst for developing the XV system, and he joins Freya's team as a consultant. Axel combines mathematical precision with practical application, helping translate complex concepts into usable frameworks. Matilda, Chief Executive Officer of Nexus Global, a forward thinking leader who values innovation but ultimately needs to see measurable results. She appointed Freya to transform the innovation function but must balance long term vision with short term business pressures. David The meticulous chief financial officer at Nexus Global David approaches business with surgical precision, focusing on demonstrable proof and measurable outcomes. His pointed question about innovation's value triggers Freya's quest for a better measurement system. These characters represent the diverse stakeholders and perspectives that influence innovation in organizations. Their interactions, challenges, and evolving viewpoints illustrate the human side of innovation and transformation. Book structure This alternating rhythm between narrative and conceptual sections serves multiple purposes. One it demonstrates the human side of innovation and transformation alongside the technical components. two, it shows how the frameworks operate in organizational settings with all their complexity and politics. three it addresses both rational and emotional aspects of change, recognizing that innovation performance requires both technical solutions and cultural shifts. four it creates space for reflection between theoretical understanding and practical application. The narrative and conceptual chapters are seamlessly interwoven rather than explicitly labelled, allowing the story and the frameworks to naturally reinforce each other. This approach reflects how innovation works in practice, a blend of human experience and systematic thinking. Throughout the book you'll also find key concepts are highlighted essential elements of the expected value system implementation notes offering practical advice for application in your organization Reflection Questions to help you relate the concepts to your specific situation. At the start of each act, yes, the use of acts is a deliberate nod to innovation theatre. You'll find a summary of core takeaways and a preview of what's next. The tools and templates index in the back provides resources you can adapt and use immediately in your organization. Whether you prefer to read the book straight through or focus more on either the narrative or conceptual elements based on your needs, the content is designed to build progressively while still allowing flexible navigation. Innovation and transformation is both a technical challenge and a human journey. This book structure reflects that reality, providing both the frameworks you need to build a performance system and the stories that help you navigate the inevitable human complexities along the way. Act 1. The problem with innovation performance. What gets measured gets managed. Peter Drucker. Innovation isn't suffering from a lack of ideas. It's suffering from a lack of visibility and accountability. Across industries, organizations invest more than ever in innovation initiatives, but when it comes time to show the value, the room goes quiet. Executives want outcomes. Innovation leaders offer activity. The conversation breaks down, and the work that once felt bold begins to feel disposable. This is the innovation illusion, where movement is mistaken for momentum and visibility is replaced by theatre. The innovation measurement paradox. We've reached a paradoxical moment in business history. Innovation has never been more critical to organizational survival, yet it remains one of the least rigorous business functions in terms of measurements and accountability. Consider the contradiction. For decades we've refined how we measure virtually every aspect of business performance. Finance has sophisticated models for capital allocation and forecasting. Marketing has attribution frameworks that track the customer journey to the pixel. Operations teams optimize supply chains with six sigma precision. Even HR has evolved to measure talent impact through advanced analytics. But innovation, we're still using metrics designed for activity, not impact. This isn't because innovation is inherently unmeasurable, it's because we've accepted a false narrative that creativity and measurement are somehow at odds, that innovation is special, exempt from the disciplines that every other function must embrace. This lack of visibility isn't just frustrating, it's expensive. When innovation can't demonstrate its value in meaningful terms, several predictable patterns emerge. One budget vulnerability. Innovation investments are the first to be cut when resources tighten. Two strategic disconnect. Innovation activities drift away from core business needs. Three talent disillusionment. The best innovators leave tired of fighting for legitimacy. Four portfolio bloat. Projects linger in zombie states neither progressing nor properly terminated. Five Credibility Erosion Innovation becomes seen as a luxury rather than a necessity. The collective cost of these patterns is immense. Beyond wasted resources, organizations lose their capacity to evolve deliberately. They become reactive rather than proactive, responding to disruption rather than creating it. Act one unpacks this illusion. We'll meet Freya, a seasoned innovation leader, doing everything right and still losing the room. We'll explore the limitations of the current system and the disconnect between culture building and value creation. And we'll begin to ask the question at the center of this book. What if innovation could be measured with the same clarity, confidence, and credibility as any other part of the business? As we follow Freya's journey, we'll see these challenges come to life and discover how they can be overcome through a systematic approach to innovation performance. It doesn't start with more activity, it starts with a better system. Let's begin. Chapter one The Innovation Illusion Innovation isn't broken, but the way we measure it is. Freya stared at her reflection in the hallway mirror, blazer on, laptop bag over one shoulder, hair already starting to frizz from the damp London air pressing through the window she'd cracked open for some fresh air. She was prepared. Sharp. But her stomach hadn't quite got that memo. She could recite the pitch in her sleep by now. Thirty seven pilots across nine business units. Idea submissions up seventy two percent, four cross functional hackathons, five startup collaborations, the right message, all the right signals. But that didn't stop her thumb from tapping nervously against her notebook as she checked the slides one last time. This has to land, she said quietly to herself. Freya had been leading innovation at Nexus Global for just over eighteen months. A mid-sized financial services firm with traditional roots but digital ambitions, Nexus had created her role with considerable fanfare. Director of Innovation Strategy and Transformation came with a mandate, a modest team, and a first year budget that had seemed generous at the time. Matilda, the CEO, had personally championed her appointment, seeing innovation as critical to the company's future. Make us ready for what's next, she'd said during Freya's interview. That directive had seemed exciting then, now it felt like a wait. Heading into her second annual review, the innovation budget felt precarious. The initial enthusiasm that had greeted her appointment had gradually given way to a more measured curiosity. The polite nods had become probing questions. The executive sponsors who had once cleared obstacles now asked for metrics. It wasn't that she hadn't delivered. By every conventional measure of innovation activity, her team had outperformed. The innovation platform she'd implemented had generated over four hundred ideas. The hackathons had produced functional prototypes. The startup partnerships had given the company access to technologies they couldn't have developed internally. But something was shifting. She could feel it in the hallway conversations that paused when she approached. In the calendar invites suddenly requiring pre allocation. Alignment before innovation updates. In the way Finance had begun asking for more granular breakdowns of her team's expenditures. The boardroom was colder than usual. The aircon always ran too high when someone from finance was presenting. She was early, always was, but the COO was already there, eyes flicking between slack messages and the day's forecast. A tray of untouched pastries sat in the middle of the table like a peace offering no one trusted. Matilda, the CEO, arrived next, warm, casual, as always with her iPad, AI note taker, and reusable coffee cup, steaming with fresh coffee. Big day, Freya, she said with a nod. Excited to see what you've built. Freya smiled genuinely, even as her heart tripped. And then came David. He walked in like he always did, calm, precise, neutral. The CFO didn't waste words, but when he asked questions, they stuck. In another life David might have been a surgeon. He had that way of looking at problems, clinical, detached, focused on what could be excised. Numbers weren't just figures to him, they were vital signs, and he treated the business like a patient whose health required constant careful monitoring. Freya had known David would be her toughest audience, not because he was hostile to innovation he wasn't, but because he operated in a world of demonstrable proof. Return on investment, payback periods, contribution margins, the concrete language of business performance. The other executives filed in, marketing, technology, human resources, customer experience, twelve faces waiting for her to justify eighteen months of runway. Freya clicked into presenter mode. No turning back. She started with momentum. In the last twelve months we've launched thirty seven pilots across nine business units. Idea volume is up seventy two percent. We've partnered with five startups, tested two AI applications, and held four enterprise wide innovation events. She moved quickly, each slide cleaner than the last. A pipeline visual showing ideas flowing neatly through gates, word clouds from employee feedback surveys, future optimism creative excited a heat map of innovation activity by region Participation Energy Buzz. She could feel herself lifting slightly with each transition. The middle section showcased three initiatives in more detail an internal process automation that had reduced processing time in operations, a customer facing chatbot pilot with promising early metrics, a blockchain experiment in partnership with two fintech startups, all solid work, all demonstrating progress. We've built the foundations, she said, voice strong. Now we're ready to scale what works. She let the final slide settle, then looked up. That's when David shifted in his chair. It's great that people are engaged, he said calmly. And it looks like you've created a lot of activity. He tapped the table twice with his pen. Just twice. But Freya, what's the value of all this? The silence wasn't awkward, it was surgical. She opened her mouth ready to speak, then stopped. She had case studies, stories, cultural metrics, testimonials, but what David was asking for was something else. He didn't want the story, he wanted the signal. We've seen early indicators of value, she began, knowing even as the words formed that they sounded defensive. The process automation in operations is tracking toward a twenty two percent reduction in manual work. David nodded, but his expression remained unchanged. And the other thirty six pilots? They're at different stages, Freya replied. Some are still in validation. Others are gathering user feedback. We're building a culture of experimentation which takes time to I understand culture is important, David interjected, not unkindly. But at some point culture needs to translate to outcomes. We've invested nearly two million in this function. I'm trying to understand what the business is getting in return. The CEO shifted, clearly uncomfortable with the directness of the question, but not intervening. The CTO studied Eo's notebook. The COO crossed her legs and started reviewing her notes. Freya caught Matilda's eye briefly, seeing both sympathy and expectation there. The CEO had backed her appointment, but that support wasn't unconditional. No one was being cruel. They just didn't see the value, not in the language she was speaking. Innovation is inherently difficult to quantify in early stages, Freya said, falling back on an explanation she'd read in countless white papers. The true impact often emerges over longer time horizons. What we're seeing now is strong engagement, which is a leading indicator of leading indicator of what exactly? David pressed, leaning forward slightly. I'm not questioning the activity, Freya. I'm asking how we know if it's the right activity, how we determine which of these pilots deserve more investment and which don't. How we measure progress beyond launch metrics. She mumbled something about culture leading performance, about early stage innovation being hard to quantify. She even referenced a stat she remembered from a Deloitte report, but she could feel it slipping. The meeting moved on. She got polite nods of appreciation for her efforts and platitudes from others, such as a nice work, Freya from the CMO. But the room had already moved three slides ahead. And so had David. She walked back to her desk slowly, unsure whether she should start fixing the deck or delete it altogether. The truth was she agreed with David. As the words had left her mouth she'd heard how hollow they sounded. Activity metrics, engagement scores, pilot launches. None of it answered the fundamental question What's it worth? And worse, she realized she didn't have a system to answer it. Not really. She had fragments, individual case studies, qualitative feedback, small wins elevated to represent larger patterns, but no coherent way to assess, communicate or defend the value of innovation as a function. The pilot in operations had shown actual results, but it had been more accident than design. They hadn't systematically tracked confidence in the idea over time or estimated its initial value, or connected it clearly to strategic priorities. They had just built it, launched it, and fortuitously it had worked. But that wasn't a system, it was luck. Throughout the afternoon, Freya moved through her calendar on autopilot, a check-in with her team, a review of the new ideas submitted through the platform, a call with a potential technology partner, the motions of innovation leadership. But her mind kept returning to that moment in the boardroom, the weight of David's question, the inadequacy of her answer, the growing realization that she'd built exactly what she'd been asked to build, an innovation function vibrant with activity, only to discover it wasn't what the business needed. That evening, after dinner, after the kitchen was cleaned and the emails were triaged, she reopened her laptop. She didn't look at the slides this time. She opened a blank notebook and stared at the page, the quiet hum of the fridge behind her, her pen tapping in sync with a thought she couldn't quite form. Then she wrote We don't have a performance problem, we have a communication problem. And innovation has no language, the rest of the business understands. Freya spent the next three evenings in a deep dive. Not into innovation frameworks or creativity methods, but into performance measurement. She read about portfolio theory, value at risk models in finance, decision trees in operational research. She wasn't looking for another innovation process. She was looking for a translation tool, something that could bridge the gap between innovation's uncertain potential and the business's need for confidence. As she reviewed her slides again that evening, Freya realized something was missing. Her innovation approach had been largely top-down, focusing on what the company could create rather than what users were already trying to solve themselves. We might be looking in the wrong direction, she noted in her journal. She was a champion of user-centered innovation, where end users often develop their own solutions long before companies recognize the problem. Instead of just pushing ideas through a process, perhaps they needed to look more carefully at their customers through this lens. This wasn't just about gathering feedback, it was about recognizing that innovation often begins with users, not companies. Amongst other things, her metrics had completely missed this dimension. On Friday, her search still incomplete, she met her team for their weekly standup. These were usually upbeat sessions, updates on pilots, new ideas in the pipeline, challenges overcome. But today Freya started differently. I need your honest assessment, she said, catching them off guard. If our budget was cut in half tomorrow, which half of our activities would you keep? The silence was telling. That's a big question, said a team member. Are we talking about specific pilots or the broader engagement work? Both, Freya replied. I'm trying to understand how we ourselves evaluate the value of what we're doing. Another team member spoke up. I'd keep the automation pilot. It's actually showing results. Others chimed in. The customer facing chatbot, the employee ideas platform, the quarterly innovation workshops. Each had advocates, each had reasons, but what Freya noticed was what was missing from their justifications, a coherent framework for comparison. They were making gut decisions based on a mix of sunk cost, personal involvement, and anecdotal feedback, just as she had been. She stayed up long past midnight, not solving anything but letting the discomfort stay. And in that discomfort she began asking a new question. What if the problem isn't innovation itself? What if the problem is how we decide what matters and how we measure it? She didn't know what the answer was yet. But she knew she couldn't walk back into that room with another set of slides that said nothing. Innovation needed more than activity. It needed a system. What they needed wasn't more volume, it was performance tuning. Just as engineers fine tuned systems for efficiency, reliability, and fit, innovation required deliberate calibration to deliver optimal value. We've been measuring motion, not tuning performance, Freya wrote, underlining the words twice. Innovation wasn't a production line, it was more like a Formula One car, constantly adjusted, balanced, and optimized for the specific conditions it faced. On Saturday mornings, Freya sat at her kitchen table surrounded by notes, articles, and the dregs of her second coffee. She stared at a scribble diagram, her latest attempt to connect innovation activities to business outcomes. It wasn't working. The lines between creativity and value remained tenuous, theoretical. Then her phone buzzed. A message from her younger brother, Axel, saw this and thought of you. Sports data people might be onto something for business. LMK what you think? A he attached an article about a football club that had completely transformed its scouting and player development using advanced metrics, not just tracking game performance but expected goals, based on a range of input data. They are measuring the probability of value, not just the actual outcomes, she whispered to herself. Something clicked. What if innovation could be evaluated the same way? Not just by what it had already delivered, but by what it was likely to deliver, based on evidence backed confidence? She quickly typed a response. This is exactly what I need. Free for coffee tomorrow. Axel replied almost instantly. Only if you're buying, and only if you'll finally admit that data beats gut feel. Freya smiled for the first time in days. Never. But I'll buy the coffee anyway. The path forward wasn't clear yet, but for the first time since that boardroom silence she felt a sense of possibility. The ancient story of Icarus came to mind, the boy who flew with wax wings and fell to his death, but Freya remembered that the full myth wasn't just about flying too close to the sun. Daedalus had also warned his son not to fly too low, where sea spray would soak the wings and drag him down. Innovation faced the same dual risks, excessive ambition that ignored practical constraints, and insufficient ambition that never left the ground. Most organizations didn't suffer from too much ambition. They suffered from what some had called ambition deficit disorder, setting their sights too low, focusing on incremental improvements when transformation was possible. Her team's metrics had no way to distinguish between these two failures, the overly ambitious and the insufficiently bold. They tracked activity regardless of height. Innovation wasn't broken, the way it was measured was, and she was determined to fix it. She didn't yet have a formula, but she knew she needed one, something that would connect confidence in an idea to its predicted value in market, account for timing and urgency, and measure how well it fit the organization's capabilities. She scribbled some initial thoughts. Need to measure. How sure are we? What it could be worth? When it matters? Whether it's right for us? It was rough, but it was a start. As she sketched ideas in her notebook, she drew a gentle S shaped curve. Innovation didn't happen in a vacuum or move in a straight line, it followed natural cycles of emergence, acceleration, maturity, and eventual decline. We're treating all ideas the same, she realized, regardless of where they sit on their life cycle. Some needed exploration, others acceleration, still others optimization or renewal. A true innovation system would need to account for these different stages and their unique requirements. Innovation was inherently difficult to predict. But that didn't mean it was impossible to measure. Too long, didn't read it. Innovation Director Freya delivers an activity focused presentation to her executive team, but is challenged by the CFO with a simple question what's the value of all this? Despite having metrics on engagement, pilots, and activity, she realizes she lacks a system to demonstrate genuine value creation. This represents the fundamental disconnect plaguing innovation functions, measuring motion instead of impact.