Evaluating innovation ideas: a comprehensive approach to New Product Development

Abstract

Many companies still invest most of their innovation resources in projects that never reach the market or prove to be flop soon after launch. Simultaneously, genuine 'big ideas' often experience difficulties in surviving the early stages of development. Firms assigning resources to, providing organisational framing for, and stimulating synergies between related New Product Development (NPD)-projects stand a chance to achieve better returns on innovation. Adapted from literature-based discussions and empirical findings we describe which problems continue to crop up when trying to evaluate innovation ideas. Furthermore we address how organisational limits and decision mechanisms for the evaluation of innovation are structured.