Approaches to Innovation Process Assessment: Complex Results from an Exploratory Investigation

Abstract

Managing innovation is vital for many enterprises to survive in the competitive and dynamic environment. Thus, decision-makers have always been involved into the challenge of finding the right performance measures for innovation process. This paper tackles the issue of innovation performance measurement and management. Its main goal is to present complex results obtained from Czech manufacturing industry within research project “Innovation Process Performance Assessment: a Management Control System Approach in the Czech Small and Medium-sized Enterprises” financed by Czech Science Foundation – 13-20123P. The results revealed many positive aspects of investigated issue. Czech companies are aware of importance of innovations and perform them in various forms. Moreover, the vast majority of respondents also evaluate the implemented innovations no matter size of the company. SMEs and large companies differ in innovation performance measurement and management control techniques or methods. However, both groups adopt rather traditional measurement tools than modern techniques. Here, the gap between global and Czech companies has been discovered. Therefore, the paper is supposed to motivate researchers to conduct more large scale studies in the area of innovative performance measurement systems implementation in different business sector and areas.Managing innovation is vital for many enterprises to survive in the competitive and dynamic environment. Thus, decision-makers have always been involved into the challenge of finding the right performance measures for innovation process. This paper tackles the issue of innovation performance measurement and management. Its main goal is to present complex results obtained from Czech manufacturing industry within research project “Innovation Process Performance Assessment: a Management Control System Approach in the Czech Small and Medium-sized Enterprises” financed by Czech Science Foundation – 13-20123P. The results revealed many positive aspects of investigated issue. Czech companies are aware of importance of innovations and perform them in various forms. Moreover, the vast majority of respondents also evaluate the implemented innovations no matter size of the company. SMEs and large companies differ in innovation performance measurement and management control techniques or methods. However, both groups adopt rather traditional measurement tools than modern techniques. Here, the gap between global and Czech companies has been discovered. Therefore, the paper is supposed to motivate researchers to conduct more large scale studies in the area of innovative performance measurement systems implementation in different business sector and areas.