A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Magdalena Jurczyk – Bunkowska
� What is the role of planning in innovation process management? In what scope should the
innovation process planning be linked with its final success?
1.3 Innovation success
The difficulties of measuring success have driven project managers to use simple criteria such as
achieving target budget, scheduled goal and acceptable performance, even though these measures
are partial and often misleading of the real project success (Sattler, 2011). Pinto and Prescott (1988)
suggest that researchers in project management need to first and most importantly give a
comprehensive and clear definition of project success before starting to undertake studies of the
project implementation process. Innovation process success is even harder to define explicitly;
colloquially it can be defined as achieving the assumed level of sale of the innovative product. In case
of non- product innovations a different kind of approach is necessary to determine success. For the
need of this research it has been decided that the success of innovation comes with achieving the
expected level of organization’s development which is adequate to incurred costs. It can be for
example the market share increase, rise of sales income, decrease of the guarantee repairs number,
time reduction of designing a new product, etc. Nonetheless a manager from Technokabel Company
noticed that this definition is not precise enough. He came up with the example of innovation which
turned out to be initially a failure in the economic sense; initially because not even a year later this
innovation led to elaborating a technology for producing a different, world-scale innovative product. It
resulted with a significant and long-lasting market advantage. Therefore the manager suggested that
while evaluating innovation success the whole degree of organization’s development should be taken
into account together with the growth of totally new and unique knowledge within the organization. It is
compliant with the Tidd and Bessant’s concept (2005) which indicates the significance of learning
through the realization of innovation processes. Yet it was decided, regarding the scope and aim of
the research, to stick to the original definition of innovation success. Even though this definition omits
many cases, it allows to precisely and quickly identify those innovation processes which require
further analysis. It relates to the fact that every innovation which leads to development is regarded as
a success.
This article is organized into three sections. Section 2 explains the scope and method of the research.
Section 3 presents the analyzed and discussed research findings and describes the suggested threestage
planning model for innovation processes. Findings which sum up the article are linked with
relations between planning and the remaining managing functions of innovation processes. They also
emphasize the role of planning in innovation success.
2. Research method
The genesis of the research was to indicate which management practices in the planning stage lead
the innovation process to the final success. More than ten semi-structured interviews were conducted.
Firms that were asked to cooperate were top Polish innovation leaders in 2010. At least three different
innovation processes were analyzed in every interview and they used the same list of questions.
However during the interviews some of these questions were expanded in a different way. Research
scheme for elaborating the planning model of innovation processes was presented in Figure 2. This
research was financed by the Polish government agency, National Science Centre.
Table 1 presents the selected nine companies where the research was conducted. They were chosen
for this presentation due to their variety of branches, size and time presence on the market. Detailed
description of innovation processes management in those companies is presented in the further part
of the article and uses marks from the first column of table 1.
3. Analysis and discussion of research results
Literature research and observations basing on the interviews in companies which deal with
innovation processes on a daily basis led to two main findings, those findings determined further
research. The first one refers to differences in approach to managing processes of similar features. A
classification was suggested in order to indicate the category with which a particular innovation
process should be linked so as to apply rational managing procedures. The second finding covers the
specification of planning the innovation processes basing on plan detailing during the realization of
the innovation process.
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