KPI Dashboard Toolkit

Four ready-made KPI dashboards, one for each audience you report to, with early warnings and a one-page board report that builds itself.

What it does

Many partnership dashboards end up as one long spreadsheet that tries to serve everyone and works for no one. The board wants five numbers. The tech transfer office needs operational detail. Faculty want to see how they're doing without being ranked. Prospective partners and the public need a short, credible story.

The KPI Dashboard Toolkit gives you four ready-made dashboards, one for each of those audiences, each with a recommended set of measures you can keep or swap. For every measure you enter a starting point, a target and your results each period, and the workbook shows the trend, your progress toward the target, and a clear status: on track, at risk or needs intervention. It also gives you early warning. Most of the early measures it ships with are paired with the result they predict on the same dashboard. When an early measure slips while its result still looks fine, the toolkit warns you that the result may follow, so you can act while there's still time.

A one-page board report builds itself from the dashboards: headline numbers you choose, a status summary by audience, the measures that need intervention, and trend charts. A dictionary of 46 measures explains how each one is calculated, where its data comes from, who owns it and, where one exists, the AUTM survey item it matches, so your numbers hold up when someone asks how they were produced. The Research dashboard follows responsible-metrics principles and is kept out of the board report. You type the values in; the toolkit doesn't connect to other systems.

Who it's for

Partnership analytics teams, TTO and research office operations leads, and anyone asked for a dashboard who wants an evidence-backed starting set and a board report that computes itself.

What's inside, sheet by sheet

• Cover and Instructions: how the dashboards work, how status is decided, and a quick start that gets two dashboards running before you add the rest.
• Board One-Pager: the report to print and share: five headline numbers, status by audience, the list of measures needing intervention with owner notes, and charts.
• Executive Tier: quarterly measures for the vice president for research, CFO or board, such as the repeat-partner rate and the value of the partnership pipeline.
• Operational Tier: working measures for the tech transfer office and partnership managers, reviewed weekly, such as invention disclosures and days to contract.
• Research Tier: measures a faculty investigator tracks against personal goals, designed to support researchers rather than rank them.
• Public Tier: measures refreshed each year for prospective partners and the public, such as licenses and options executed and industry-funded research.
• KPI Dictionary: definitions for 46 measures, including alternates you can swap in, each with its data source, owner and, where one exists, the matching AUTM survey item. Pick a measure from the dictionary and the dashboard fills in its settings.
• Methodology and Sample: the research behind the structure, and an eight-quarter worked example with every result and what the board report shows.

Every dashboard has room for measures of your own.

What you need to use it

Excel 2016 or later (sparklines and the dictionary drop-downs need Excel; a compatible app shows the values without them), and for each KPI a direction, baseline, target, and the period values you have so far. Start with two tiers and add the rest later. The Board One-Pager is the sheet to print and share.

The methodology and the sources it cites

The four-tier taxonomy and leading-versus-lagging structure come from The Helikon Method, The Analytics Advantage, with metric structure from Kaplan and Norton (1996), Kaplan, Norton and Rugelsjoen (2010) and Bamford and Ernst (2002). The status thresholds, the early-warning rule and the progress measure are Helikon Labs practitioner judgment, not an industry standard. The Research tier follows the Leiden Manifesto (Hicks et al., 2015) and DORA (2012) and cites Patel et al. (2022) on participatory dashboard design. The Dictionary maps each KPI to its closest AUTM Licensing Activity Survey item where one exists and names Snowball Metrics counterparts.

Where it sits in the Helikon Method

Evaluate phase (evaluation and exit), built from The Helikon Method, The Analytics Advantage. Use it at dashboard build-out, every reporting period and at the board review.

Related workshop and bundle

Our Measuring Partnership ROI and Impact workshop includes this toolkit. It belongs to our Scale and Analytics Bundle, rolling out in batches as tools go live.

License

Single-organization internal-use license: your organization may use it internally without seat limits, and may not resell or redistribute it. Dashboards and figures you build from your own data with the toolkit may be published; the template itself may not.