Being able to measure innovation has long been considered the Holy Grail of innovation management. This session caters for the needs of top managers tasked with explaining to their boards why continuing to invest in innovation is an activity still worth doing in their respective companies, with arguments going beyond just employee engagement, good marketing or hackathons. Join the session to learn from the authors of the forthcoming Innovation Accounting book how to measure innovation.

Dan Toma is an innovation thought leader and the co-author of the award winning book 'The Corporate Startup’, awarded ‘Management Book of the Year for Innovation and Entrepreneurship’ by Chartered Management Institute and The British Library in 2018. Puzzled by the questions ‘why are innovative products mainly launched by startups?’, he focuses on enterprise innovation strategy - 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 he worked with companies like Deutsche Telekom, Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Bayer, John Deere or Allianz. Dan was featured on the Thinkers50 2020 Radar list of management thinkers to watch and he’s also a member of World Economic Forum’s working group on accelerating digital transformation. Esther Gons is the founder and CEO of GroundControl. GroundControl is innovation software to create, manage and measure your innovation ecosystem. The platform focuses heavily on innovation accounting and helps corporate startup teams with the development of new business models. GroundControl works with clients such as Schiphol Group, DHL and ABN Amro. Esther is author of The Corporate Startup and The NEXT Canvas and is an international speaker on topics of corporate innovation, innovation accounting, entrepreneurship, and startups. She has been an entrepreneur for over 20 years and mentored over several hundred startups so far, e.g. as investor at NEXT Startup Ventures, lead mentor in the Rockstart Accelerator programmes, and Lean Startup Machine weekends.