A Framework for Managing Innovation and Measuring the Innovation Processes

Abstract:

Managing innovation as a process is vital for entrepreneurs and businesses. Through our literature review we realized that the innovation measurement in many organizations does not appear to take place routinely within management practice and that, where it does, it tends to focus on output measures. Further, from the relatively small number of empirical studies of measurement in practice, measurement of innovation management appears to be under­taken infrequently as an ad hoc approach, and relies on outdated innovation frameworks due to the accelerated progress of technology and R&D management. The consequence of this is the absence of an updated rigorous and generic framework covering the range of all activities required to generate and manage ideas and turn these ideas into useful added values and new marketable products, services, or business model. In this paper we introducing generic but comprehensive framework that addresses the innovation management at both levels of the firms and projects.  We first developed a synthesized framework of the innovation management and activities consisting of nine dimensions: innovation strategy, organizational culture, organization structure, innovation resources, knowledge management, innovation processes, commercialization, innovation network, and open innovation. Second, introduced the Innovation Balanced Score Card (IBSC) to measure four categories of innovation Key Performance Indicators (KPI). The paper makes two important contributions. First, it takes the difficult step of incorporating a vastly diverse innovation frameworks into a single framework. Second, it provides innovation KPI against which managers can evaluate their own innovation activity, explore the extent to which their organization is nominally innovative or whether or not innovation is embedded throughout their organization, and identify areas for improvement.  Through the application of this framework to a particular context, practi­tioners will be able to conduct an evaluation of their own innovation management activity, identify gaps, weaknesses or deficiencies, and also improvement potential.