Measuring team innovativeness: A multiple case study of agile and lean software developing companies

Paper in proceeding, 2017

[Context/Background] Innovation is seen as the basis of competitive economy and measuring the innovation process is important fo r organizations. In the literature, focus has been on innovation and innovation capabilities on an organizational level, while few studies has been placed on innovation at team level. Furthermore, organizations tend to focus on the measurement of innovation to input and outputs of the innovation process and ignoring the process in-between. [Goal] This paper explores how a team’s innovation capability is measured, and can be measured in practice in agile and lean software developing companies. [Method] It is based on data collected through semi-structured interviews with 28 practitioners from 11 software developing companies. [Results] The contribution of this study is twofold: First, it characterizes which metrics are used in industry to measure a team’s innovation capability. Second, it identifies which metrics that could be used in practice to measure a team’s innovation capability. [Conclusions] Measuring the performance of the innovation process is not seen as important during product planning and development.