Early Stages Of Innovation Process Research Articles

Enhancing design thinking approaches to innovation through gamification

PurposeThe paper aims to explore the relationship between gamification and design thinking approach to innovation in the context of the early stage of innovation process (ESoIP). Design thinking is conceptually appropriate to support innovative, complex and uncertain business environments. Still, its practices have demonstrated some difficulties in managing the ESoIP, such as lack of structure and clarity around goals. This paper argues that gamification can enhance and complement design thinking in the management of firms' ESoIP.Design/methodology/approachGiven the need to achieve a deeper understanding of the linkages between gamification and design thinking, the paper follows an exploratory theory building approach for this complex reality of innovation. The case study research method was conducted in three firms (Trivalor, Novartis and Microsoft) that applied a gamification approach to the ESoIP.FindingsThe results demonstrate that gamification has the power to enhance and complement design thinking practices by getting tasks more organized and improving coordination and employees' engagement in the innovation process.Practical implicationsThe paper provides critical managerial contributions on how firms can use gamification to improve design thinking approaches to ESoIP. Its consequences are also crucial to innovation, R&D, and product/service development managers interested in using gamification to support the ideation and concept development of new solutions complementing traditional design thinking approaches.Originality/valueMerging the gamification and design thinking approaches is novel, particularly on firms' ESoIP. The paper provides a comprehensive discussion of design thinking shortcomings and the role that gamification can play in overcoming them.

Using Patent Information for Identification of New Product Features with High Market Potential

The current situation in planning and executing of innovation projects within industrial companies still contains considerable drawbacks such as the lack of the tools for systematic task definition for short to long term innovation or low reliability of market success prediction for new product concepts in the early stages of innovation process. Despite the best efforts to reduce risk of failures, the majority of all industrial innovation initiatives offers only incremental improvements compared to the products on the market. The attempts to incorporate customers into new product development require time-expensive customer interviews or extensive field research and seldom deliver significant competitive advantages. The paper discusses the possibilities of fast systematic identification of underserved customer needs, innovation tasks and new product features based on the internal competences of companies, on the analysis of the patent databases and the verification through market tests. The new approach focuses on identification and evaluation of customer needs, understood as solution-neutral benefits, which are expected by the customers. It proposes to enhance the function and contradiction analysis of technical systems and the analysis of the customer working process with the identification of customer benefits obtained from the patent databases. Similar customers’ working processes in various industrial sectors often have different levels of technical and technological evolution. This fact gives the opportunity to identify and to transfer customer needs known in one sector to another sector where these needs are still latent. Using patent information makes the customer needs transfer feasible and manageable.

Organisation of the early phases of the radical innovation process

The early stages of the innovation process, the so-called fuzzy front-end of innovations, are of particular relevance for the success of innovation projects. Empirical studies were so far only conducted on these stages with respect to incremental innovations. However, both literature and practitioners call for a deeper understanding of radical innovations because of their fundamental need to be managed in a different way than incremental innovations. This contribution presents the results of in-depth case studies of the early stages of the radical innovation process in eight technology-based companies. First, we present the reasons for the increased interest of the companies studied in radical innovations and particularly their early phases. Second, we differentiate between three types of companies in managing the early phases of the radical innovation process: the process-oriented, the culture-oriented and the need-oriented companies. Third, we develop a process model of the early phases of the radical innovation process and discuss the three types and their differences along the model. Finally, we derive managerial implications for the early phases of the radical innovation process.