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Tracking innovation is hard, but this research from MIT puts it into terms that we can all agree are appealing - profit. Some of the research shows that the more innovative the company, the more profitable it was as well.

The data also gives insight into how to structure your organization so you can reap those rewards.

Does a commitment to corporate innovation actually pay off? If so, how could you prove it?

We recently researched this question across five years of data from 154 companies. Because these companies all used the same ideation management software, we were able to seek correlations between their commitment to innovation and their public financial results, such as growth and profit. (The data about individual participants at each company and about the companies themselves remains private; this study analyzed only public financial information and anonymized company metadata.)

The companies in this study all used a platform that enables employees to share ideas in response to challenges created by management, or comment or vote on ideas shared by others. As we demonstrated in our previous research, the key variable that predicts successful innovation across these companies is ideation rate: the number of winning ideas generated per 1,000 active users. In this context, winning ideas means employee-generated ideas that were finally selected by management for active development and implementation.

We examined the relationship between ideation rate and several publicly reported financial metrics (based on generally accepted accounting principles [GAAP]) for the 28 public companies in our data set for the time period between 2014 and 2016. We found a significant correlation between the ideation rate at these companies and growth in profit or net income: The more ideation, the faster they grew. (See “Profit Growth Is Correlated With More Accepted Ideas.”) While the correlation is far from perfect, this clearly is not a random effect; you’d expect to see a correlation this strong by random chance less than one time in 100.

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