Innovation Evaluation Overview

Principles

Definition

Innovation evaluation is a research field and methodological approach focused on the systematic assessment of the processes, outcomes, and impacts of innovation. Its significance lies in providing evidence-based insights to guide decision-making, facilitate learning, and optimize resource allocation in innovation initiatives.

Ontological type

Core Methods

Measurement Metrics

Strategic Uses

Key developments

Key Figures

Integrated Systems Evaluation era

Roy Rothwell [1] was a central figure in the early 1990s, with ties to the University of Sussex [3]. His 1992 paper, Successful industrial innovation: critical factors for the 1990s [6], highlighted factors critical to industrial innovation and laid the groundwork for multidimensional evaluation in the era. Richard Florida [2] is among the scholars linked with the University of Toronto [4] and Carnegie Mellon University [5] during this era. His 1994 paper, The Geographic Sources of Innovation: Technological Infrastructure and Product Innovation in the United States [7], demonstrated how regional technological infrastructure channels influence innovation diffusion and capability development, informing integrated evaluation approaches in this era.

Open Innovation Metrics era

Ammon Salter [1] is associated with Imperial College London [3] and the University of Sussex [4] in this era. His key contributions include developing openness-based explanations of innovation performance and examining boundary-crossing knowledge flows, as highlighted by Open for innovation: the role of openness in explaining innovation performance among U.K. manufacturing firms [7] and The role of technology in the shift towards open innovation: the case of Procter & Gamble [8], which underlined how external ideas and technology drive rapid, market-oriented development. Keld Laursen [2] is affiliated with Aalborg University [5] and Copenhagen Business School [6] during this era. His contributions focus on openness and external sourcing for innovation performance in this era, as evidenced by the 2005 Open for innovation paper [7], which helped establish the empirical basis for openness-driven performance in manufacturing and services.

Policy-Governed Evaluation era

Clayton M. Christensen [1] is a leading figure in open-innovation scholarship during 2011-2024, with affiliation at Harvard University [3]. His paper What Is Disruptive Innovation [6] clarified how disruptive changes alter incumbents and policy choices for evaluating openness, making it foundational for policy-governed evaluation in this era. Henry Chesbrough [2] stands as a central innovator in this policy-governed era, with affiliations to University of California, Berkeley [4] and Carnegie Mellon University [5]. His works Open Innovation: Where We've Been and Where We're Going [7], Value Creation and Value Capture in Open Innovation [8], and Open innovation with Chinese characteristics: a dynamic capabilities perspective [9] collectively shaped how open strategies translate into measurable outcomes in policy contexts.