•Open innovation (OI) is used across industries, including in pharma; however, measuring OI effectiveness is challenging because of the long cycle times inherent to drug discovery.•Clinical attrition and outcomes do not assess effectiveness of early drug discovery.•Measuring systems in drug discovery must focus on attributes of its proximal inputs and outputs and metrics should consider the cyclical nature of the drug discovery process.•A practical dashboard in early drug discovery incorporates performance and cultural metrics. Today, most pharmaceutical companies complement their traditional R&D models with some variation on the Open Innovation (OI) approach in an effort to better access global scientific talent, ideas and hypotheses. Traditional performance indicators that measure economic returns from R&D through commercialization are often not applicable to the practical assessment of these OI approaches, particularly within the context of early drug discovery. This leaves OI programs focused on early R&D without a standard assessment framework from which to evaluate overall performance. This paper proposes a practical dashboard for such assessment, encompassing quantitative and qualitative elements, to enable decision-making and improvement of future performance. The use of this dashboard is illustrated using real-time data from the Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery (OIDD) program. This article provides a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of the Lilly Open Innovation Drug Discovery program and proposes a global leading indicator dashboard incorporating qualitative and quantitative metrics.