Community Forum – What is your approach to your Vitality Index? 

A: What is your approach to your Vitality Index? 

Please find below the responses to this week’s IRI Community Forum Survey. Thank you to those who took the time to add their input! 

Vitality Index (new product revenues as a percent of total revenues) is a common metric used to show the innovation effectiveness of an R&D organization. We are interested in improving the effectiveness of our vitality index and would like to understand how others approach this.

Responses are below.

Community Responses

Other:

• Not new / new from us / new to world vs better  / on-par
• Can be a number of things that are not considered maintenance
• Also ADI, growth of sales of existing products enabled by technical/R&D work

What issues or concerns does your organization have with the Vitality Index calculation? 

• It can be subjective
• Unclear what the goal is or should be
• Consistency in determining which products to include; defensibility of those products
• Cannibalization
• Ability to track revenue from products that are sold in bundles like startup kits or workflow kits.
• It doesn’t necessarily correlate with revenue growth. Ultimately what we want innovation to enable is revenue and margin growth above our peers.