Metrics Series
Measure your way to open innovation!
When you’re in corporate and working with startups, you’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty. That’s as it should be! But in an uncertain world, how do you evaluate what you’re doing in a way that both helps you improve, and describes your impact accurately to your stakeholders? Winning innovation executives, international experts and seasoned CAF staff guide your path.
CAF presents the Metrics Series — a set of measurement workshops designed to address:
- Forecasting: How much time does the core business really have before it exhausts its technical and market growth potential? Help your stakeholders develop a healthy fear of the future, and confidence in what you can accomplish in the time before the expiration date.
- Selection: Use the Innovation Compass to decide which startups make sense as partners.
- Progress: Decide what counts as progress toward your firm’s specific needs.
- Engine evaluation: Create a credible, industry-recognized and stakeholder-approved framework for improving and gaining recognition for your innovation engine.
About the program
How do you measure early innovation efforts? Measurement is a corporate requirement, but the traditional approaches to measurement don’t fit with work that has to be done in uncertainty and experimentation. Our series guides your organization through creating metrics that make sense — metrics that convey urgency, provide actionable feedback and yes, make the case for go-no-go decisions. Create better, more customized metrics at a fraction of the cost you’d pay a Big 5 consulting firm.
Format
Four weekly two-hour online workshops plus weekly office hours. Practical hands-on work grounded in your own organization's metrics and context. Led by experienced innovation executives, experts and CAF staff. Pre-work and homework strongly recommended but not required.
Who can participate
Corporate innovation leaders on the startup engagement journey -- running, initiating, or exploring innovation through startup partnership.
How to enroll?
Already a Member? Register here for free to access the workshop and additional office hours and consulting. Register here to join the workshop only: 2K for the series, $700 for individual workshops. Contact us about group discounts from the same company, or for Corporate Accelerator Forum Membership.
What should you expect?
Four two-hour workshops over four weeks, with optional office hours in between. You will build your metrics dashboard during the session and refine and test it with stakeholders in between so that by week four you have a functioning metrics plan.
Free to CAF Members!
The entire series, plus extra individual support, is available to Corporate Accelerator Forum Members at no additional charge. In addition to this Series, Members get a private monthly gathering (not available to non-members), multiple seats for our annual Unleashing Startup Innovation event (value: 2K/person), access to our Innovation Process Accelerator (value: 2K/person), and access to our startup community through the Flare Corporate Readiness Accelerator. Learn more about Corporate Accelerator Forum Membership.
Leaders
A graduate of Stanford University (Human Biology) and Northwestern University (Learning Sciences), Dr. Joseph founded the Corporate Accelerator Forum in 2017. Author of the upcoming book The Corporate Open Innovation Playbook, Dr. Joseph is a veteran of corporate innovation programs and has studied dozens of active corporate-startup engagement engines. She publishes regularly in the Journal of Commercial Biotechnology and Innovation Leader, as well as other platforms. With Flare: The Corporate Readiness Program, Dr. Joseph brings her rich understanding of when, why and how corporates innovate, directly to startup founders who need to collaborate with corporates.
Learning scientist, entrepreneur and corporate innovation leader based in Silicon Valley. CEO of the Corporate Accelerator Forum.
Diana Joseph
Author of Innovation Accounting & The Corporate Startup | Thinkers50 Radar | Innovation | Ecosystems | Digital Transformation | Startups | MBA
Dan Toma
Puzzled by the questions ‘why are innovative products mainly launched by startups?’, I focus on enterprise innovation-lead transformation – specifically on the changes blue-chip organizations need to make to allow for new ventures to be built in a corporate setting. In this capacity I had the pleasure of working with companies like Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Bayer, John Deere or Allianz.
Felipe Negritto
IT Planning and Portfolio Manager at the Walt Disney Company, Corporate Innovation scholar at Claremont University.
Strategic Tech Innovation Lead for Health Solution at Intel Corporation
Shashi Jain
My work at Intel uses Lean Startup, Customer Development and Design Thinking to build new products within Internet of Things (IoT), Machine Learning, and 3D Printing. I work with startups to accelerate these innovations to market. I bring a diverse skill set and 20 years experience in business development, engineering integration, rapid prototyping, and community building to my work.
Why join now?
Metrics are an artifact of the ordinary business world, and yet innovation groups operating in uncertainty are expected to produce and rely on them. It can be done but it has to be done delicately so that the measurement drives the right behaviors instead of the wrong ones. We’ll help you build metrics that work.
Frequently asked questions
Who is invited? Join us if:
- You’re running a startup engine and the metrics you’re using are not flying with your stakeholders OR
- You own responsibilty for a startup engine, but you can’t see what’s happening on the ground.
You’re welcome to join as a way to explore this question.
We have University and not-for-profit discounts, contact us to discuss.
We are especially well suited to companies in more complex industries like pharma, advanced materials or life sciences — that’s because corporate-startup partnership is especially valuable in those industries, so we’ve come to know them best. Other industries welcome!
We’ll work with you a little differently if you’re just starting out vs. adding or converting your metrics for an operating startup engagement function — you’re welcome either way.
If you’re not engaging with startups, our metrics program is probably not the right one for you.