A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Anna Arnò, Stefano De Falco and Guglielmo Trupiano
However, in this critical scenario described above, a real opportunity of competitive advantage could
be developed for those companies that can consolidate or gain market share through their ability to
select, acquire and manage knowledge at lower costs, thus increasing their intellectual capital and
generating new economic value.
These companies are those that can best be characterized by the index proposed by AICTT, CTP
"Company Technology Performance", ie the ability to generate innovations (and hence to develop
competitiveness) against low investments (as a result of actions taken to optimize business resources
already present "in-house ") in: knowledge, research and development, CRM, training, patents,
technology tools, consulting and supply.
Thus defined, the CTP index is therefore not a static measure, and does not represent, by far, the
ability to innovate, but rather it is a dynamic quantity, which measures the sustainability of innovation.
And in that sense, measure and evaluate the technical performance of a company can be a key to
assessing the sustainability of tactical and strategic decisions for the consolidation, or the potential
growth of the firm's market position.
The evaluation of the company technological performance is certainly a complex and delicate activity,
infact, the CTP index is determined by the ability to increase, enhance, preserve and develop its
intellectual capital, and to use it for the achievement of economic and financial purposes (for example,
to negotiate access to credit, precisely on basis of an objective measure of sustainability of an
investment in innovation).
The urgency to develop, validate and apply a methodology for assessing the technical performance of
companies is due to the fact that many companies, and the aforementioned structural condition of the
global economy represents a litmus test , are run by managers not aware of the intangible values and
in these same organizations, the skills, best practices and information essential in making the policies
of subsistence and development, are jealously guarded by individual employees or, even worse, from
the occasional consultants. So, for these companies are configured too high and oversize costs of
acquisition of knowledge, and are found, typically, the obvious difficulties in using the knowledge to
generate economic value prior to their heritage of corporate knowledge becomes obsolete, together to
the total inability to use these assets as leverage.
Consistent with the premises, the evaluation of CTP index is carried out in three key areas:
� Economics of Knowledge: the ability to turn knowledge into results of corporate income;
� Knowledge Engineering: ability to manage corporate knowledge (which means remove it, clean it,
structure it, encode it, store it, distribute it, regenerate it, in a continuous cycle and permanent);
� Finance Knowledge: Ability to organize, measure, document and convert the asset value in
corporate knowledge (intellectual capital, which is made of relations, human resources and
equipment resources, the value of the production cycle, both in manufacturing than in services).
For each of the three lines, the measure of the Company Technological Performance is conducted
through the recognition of a schedule of key performance indicators (KPI) objective and verifiable.
Valued all indexes, it is possible to position the company about technological performance in terms of
overall score and scores shared for indicators of a specific director, identifying gaps and emerging
corrective actions.
One of the possible methods of synthetic representation of the CTP index is that used for energy
efficiency subsisting, between the two indexes, an analogy much deeper rather than only semantics.
6. Benefits of certification proposal
Finally and very briefly, the certification in question is intended to provide a series of intrinsic and
extrinsic benefits to all players in the process of innovation.
6.1 Advantages for companies
Companies that decide to adopt a voluntary system of certification as proposed, as a first intrinsic
advantage, have the opportunity to optimize their internal resources related to the innovation process,
and as extrinsic advantage, can have easier access to credit to Research and Innovation, in its
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