INNOVATION SCENARIOS GENERATING A STRUCTURE FOR A TOOLKIT

The industrial management challenge of coping with product innovation can be described as being a configuration problem with a high number of process variables that when combining them into one scenario have unclear or contradictory influence on the total performance. There is an urgent need to establish an integrated view of the whole product innovation process to avoid sub optimization in selected parts. From a research perspective, innovation is generally perceived as the process of turning opportunities (inventions) into ideas and putting these into (widely) used practice. However, since innovation research is a relatively young and unconsolidated field, research studies tend to originate from different domains, and represent a wide spectrum of viewpoints. To have their research result published the individual researchers or research groups need to narrow their focus which leads to a huge diversity and as yet there are no established protocols with which to facilitate comparison and accumulation of findings between research communities. This diversity results in the published findings of the studies being circulated and recognized mainly within their original domains, and points to the necessity of synthesizing the knowledge that exists in innovation research communities to be useful for a wider community.