Developing a Compass to Navigate the Innovation Journey

This chapter will present a diagnostic tool referred to as the ‘innovation compass’. The innovation compass uses a self-audit methodology to identify gaps between current and desired new product development (NPD) performance for an organization. The innovation compass aims to bring an understanding of the underlying characteristics that may contribute to the degrees of success or failure of new product development within organizations that could be used to develop an action plan to improve performance. The innovation compass comprises five core elements that represent the characteristics of the innovation process – structure, leadership, output and teams (SLOT) and context. In this chapter, the innovation compass will be used to illustrate the findings from two case studies that differ on certain characteristics. It permits the quantitative data gathered from the research to be directly compared, facilitating organizations to benchmark. The qualitative data substantiates and elaborates on the quantitative findings, providing a contextual understanding of the companies’ new product development process. The chapter concludes that understanding the context is an important factor in ensuring an effective new product development process. The tool presented in this chapter is called the ‘innovation compass’ and was developed as part of an EPSRC funded research project, EPSRC grant number GR/N21833. The authors would like to acknowledge co-researchers on the grant; Dr Qi Xu and Dina Akhmetova.