Innovation and Ontologies

Point of Departure 3
Given this progress, the companies still hold enormous potential to innovate more effectively.
Especially technologically-driven product novelties offer possibilities not yet reaped.
Consequently, focus has been turning towards the trajectory of effectiveness. Innovation
management changes from doing things right to doing the right things, from efficient delivery of
projects to specific resource allocation according to strategic leverage effect. To create maximum
effect, efforts should concentrate on the early stages of the innovation process. An increase of
effectiveness at this stage allows better allocation of resources and reduction of risk (Cooper,
2001). It consequently holds the potential to significantly reduce costs and add value.
Research and practice unanimously acclaim the importance of innovations and the decisive
influence of the early stages. Particularly effectiveness of idea assessment and selection does not
yet fulfill its potential.
On the one hand, only a small proportion of academically developed methods is ready for use by
business practitioners. On the other hand, available action-oriented methods are not often
enough deployed in management practice. In many companies, idea assessment and selection
tend to be ad hoc and intuitive, rely on subjective preferences and individual experience (Cooper, 2006a;
Ernst, 2002; Herstatt, Verworn & Nagahira, 2004; Montoya-Weiss & O'Driscoll, 2000; Tidd,
Bessant & Pavitt, 2005). Systematic, transparent and comprehensible decision-making is rare.
Besides this methodological aspect, communication problems are frequent. Frequently, during the
early stages of the innovation process, different departments or companies collaborate on future
products. These crossfunctional teams apparently use one language. However, due to their specific
background and knowledge an engineer discussing with a marketing person might easily be
misunderstood. Thus, different languages and potential for misunderstandings are inherent to the
early stages of the innovation process; often, they are not sufficiently taken into account.
Problems are aggravated if teams are transnational and necessary information is tacit, i.e. sticky and
difficult to share.
To summarize, little development and application of action-oriented methods as well as problems
in communication – both hindering increase of effectiveness – can be identified as the main
problems during the early stages of idea assessment and selection.