Designing metrics that preserve resilience and long-term value

Il modo in cui si decide cosa contare influenza risultati concreti e scelte strategiche: metriche guidano le priorità di prodotto, gli investimenti e persino la biodiversità delle colture. Questo articolo confronta due mosse diverse ma collegate. Una è la scommessa decennale di Fortnox per capire il significato di successo aziendale. L’altra è l’espansione commerciale di Computomics, che usa modelli per prevedere come varietà agricole reggeranno calore e siccità. L’obiettivo è dare a founder, investitori e operatori strumenti pratici per disegnare indicatori che incentivino valore sostenibile.

Measuring without distorting behavior: cross lessons

Fortnox, the Swedish cloud platform founded in 2001 to manage accounting, invoicing and payroll for small and medium enterprises, has allocated €4.5 million, that is 50 million kronor, over ten years. The contribution funds the new Center for Responsible Performance Measurement at the Stockholm School of Economics and a dedicated professorship. The intent is to understand which metrics truly drive sustainable value. The aim is to avoid KPIs producing short-sighted behavior among managers and finance leaders. Metrics shape product and investment priorities across organizations.

Computomics, a spin-off of the Max Planck Institute and the University of Tübingen, raised €6.3 million in a Series B to bring its model-based breeding approach to market. Convent Capital Agri Food Fund led the round with €5 million. Their models combine genomic data with temperature, rainfall and soil characteristics. The goal is to predict how a genotype will perform under future conditions. Both cases show that choosing what to measure has real effects on day-to-day decisions, metrics drive those decisions.

Choices about what to measure change operational and strategic decisions.

When metrics drive tools and products

Fortnox intends to translate academic findings into tools that CFOs and SME owners can consult in daily reports. The plan is to turn ten years of academic knowledge into operating rules and dashboards. Those dashboards should accompany spending, product and staffing decisions. The approach aims to reflect not only growth and margins, but also resilience and long-term impact. Dashboards must reflect growth, resilience, and long-term impact.

Meanwhile Computomics offers platforms like ×SeedScore® and Pantograph, which support pangenomic analyses to discover useful traits. Using these tools allows breeders to see, before field trials, which candidates will maintain performance in hotter and drier conditions. The convergence is clear. Long research and robust testing are needed to build metrics that do not push for short-term optimizations. Long research and robust testing prevent short-term optimization traps.

Designing metrics that preserve options over time

For those building products or deciding investments the practical lesson is threefold. First, validate metrics on representative subsets of customers or environments before making them mandatory. Fortnox proposes pilots with SMEs of varying sizes. Computomics shows the importance of testing varieties in multiple environmental conditions. Second, include measures of stability in addition to performance. For example, pair yield with a consistency metric across environments that measures variability between regions. Validation must include diverse customers and environments.

Third, require independent trials and external datasets. Computomics benefits from support from the InvestEU program, which facilitates the transition from research to market. This support raises the expectation of solid evidence. Investors like Convent Capital look not only at adoption rate, but at the quality of testing. €5 million from a lead investor signals that commercial expectations and environmental impact must go hand in hand. These points help avoid indicators that reward immediate results at the expense of resilience. Independent trials and external datasets strengthen metric credibility.

Critically, there are risks and limits. A heavily data-driven approach can transfer biases. If the dataset covers only a few climatic years, even a sophisticated model can overestimate a variety’s robustness. Likewise, academic results funded by a management software provider risk steering the research agenda toward applications favorable to that provider. For this reason Fortnox has emphasized the project’s scientific autonomy at the Stockholm School of Economics. The goal is to keep findings criticizable and applicable. Scientific autonomy preserves critical and applicable findings.

The operational practice suggested for founders and investors is clear. Define minimum validation criteria for metrics. These criteria include the number and diversity of environments tested. Also separate the data used to build the model from the data used to verify it. Fortnox and Computomics demonstrate that investing in knowledge pays off only if accompanied by metrics governance and external controls, metrics drive better accountability.

Funding independent research and adopting testing requirements makes metrics more reliable.

The next choice is political and organizational. If you want metrics to drive more resilient decisions, you must fund independent research. Adopt testing requirements that avoid rewarding only what is easy to measure. The coming seasons of development and field trials will decide whether counting better leads to better decisions. If not, we will continue to favor immediate outcomes at the expense of the future.

Sources:

• What makes a business work? This Swedish scale-up has put €4.5… | eu-startups.com
• Germany’s Computomics secures €6.3 million to help crop breeders… | eu-startups.com