Innovation management : how this recent and recurrent activity is integrated into company structures and processes

Achieving a continuous flow of successful new products on the market is becoming a major stake for companies. For this reason, companies are implementing structures, methods and tools dedicated to innovation management. In this paper, we present some general and non-confidential results of the research we have carried out to compare the innovation management practices of five French companies in different sectors of activity (civil engineering, food industry, building materials, road building and aeronautics). Firstly, we argue that the project portfolio is the relevant link between the strategic and operational processes of innovation management. Then, we point out that the better the permanent and temporary structures of innovation are integrated into the company's business structures, the more efficient innovation management is. Finally, we notice that the compatibility of the tools dedicated to portfolio management with those dedicated to the management of projects is far from being satisfactory yet, in the companies we studied. As a temporary conclusion we built a typology of the innovation management situations associated with a model in order to evaluate and improve on the innovation management methods and tools already implemented.