Book · Kindle Edition · 2026
How to Measure Innovation? (book)
A practical, field-tested diagnostic for measuring innovation in organisations where creativity, community and social value are the main outputs.
What does it actually mean to innovate, and how do you prove it?
Drawing on two millennia of intellectual history, from the Greek origins of the word kainotomia to twenty-first-century management science, the book dismantles the artificial divide between social and technological innovation. Innovation, it argues, is always both at once, and treating the two as separate categories impoverishes organisations and misdirects public investment.
It then puts the argument to work. It surveys the leading frameworks for measuring organisational innovation (the Oslo Manual, the Innovation Value Chain, the Innovation Diamond and the Innovation Radar) and presents a ready-to-use diagnostic tool grounded in empirical research, qualitative interviews and Chen and Sawhney’s Innovation Radar methodology.
For whom: managers and practitioners who need to demonstrate their organisation’s value; public-policy researchers working on innovation metrics; academics in innovation studies, cultural economics and social entrepreneurship; development organisations and funders evaluating community-based initiatives.