Sustainability has become a major concern for nations and firms especially since the Kyoto Protocol was defined in 1997. While there have been several studies on benchmarks for national innovation systems and effectiveness of innovation management within firms there is as yet no reasonable metric for determining the quality of an innovation much less its quality relating to sustainability? Similarly, there have been several studies on sustainability but that such research groups have also not focused on developing a metric for denoting the quality of sustainable innovations. This paper offers a metric that defines the quality of an innovation, especially with regard to sustainability.