Mapping and Benchmarking Technological Innovation of Three International Petrochemical Companies

Abstract

Mapping technological innovation in organizations is one of the important activities that help companies to identify where organizations are clustering their innovation efforts, and where their unexplored innovation spaces are. Current published innovation mapping models do not take into consideration the comparison and benchmarking between organizations in one model. The objectives of this paper are to map innovation in three international petrochemical companies: Gulf Petrochemical Industries Company (GPIC), Saudi Basic Industries Corporation (SABIC), and Dow Chemical; compare and benchmark the results; and explore the possible areas for their innovation opportunities. An innovation mapping model was developed. Innovation data covering three years (2010-2012), were collected, analyzed and mapped on the model. The results showed that the three companies introduced a total of 194 innovations; 53% by Dow Chemical, 38% by SABIC and 9% by GPIC. Product innovations were the dominant type as they presented 57% of total innovations, where 54% of these were introduced by Dow Chemical, 46% by SABIC, and none by GPIC. Position and paradigm innovations were the least innovation type produced, where only 3% of the total innovations were in position and 1% in paradigm. The results also showed that multi-dimensional innovation represented 23.7% of total innovations, where 67.5% of these were produced by Dow Chemical, 28% by SABIC, and only 4.5% by GPIC. Product-process innovations represented 50% of the total multi-dimensional innovations. During this period only 5.7% of the total innovations were radical innovations; these were all introduced by Dow Chemical. The benchmarking results showed that product innovation was the strength in SABIC; process innovation was the strength in GPIC; and product, radical, product-position, process-position and product-paradigm were the strengths in Dow Chemical. For GPIC there are possible innovation opportunities in product, product-process and process-position innovations; for Dow Chemical and SABIC, in the process area. There are possible opportunities in radical innovation in GPIC and SABIC and plenty of innovation opportunities in the position and paradigm areas for the three companies.