Developing Innovation Benchmarks: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Benchmarking against industry averages or high performance organizations can be useful for most companies to improve products and processes, including strategic planning, forecasting marketing trends, and internal operation. Company innovation is also widely recognized as a critical process for company survival and growth. As business globalization and competition increase, company innovativeness has become essential for success. Analyses company innovativeness from a practical perspective, in terms of the activities and mechanisms necessary for companies to seek, evaluate, implement and foster the development of new ideas. The results provide strong empirical evidence that company innovation is a major determinant of company business performance. Because most benchmarking schemes are industry‐specific, focuses on the manufacturing industry. Provides a first attempt at developing an industry‐wide average for company innovativeness which business managers can use to gauge their company’s performance along the various activities required to innovate. Managers can then focus their attention on why their respective organizations vary from the industry averages regarding specific items.

Factors Influencing an Organisation's Ability to Manage Innovation: A Structured Literature Review and Conceptual Model

“…They play a central role in developing ideas as inputs into the innovation process and without ideas the innovation process simply would not function. The literature highlights that the employees of the organisation are a potential rich source of ideas and they should be encouraged to take part in the early stages to ensure a constant supply of ideas is generated to input into the innovation process (Woodman et al, 1993;Guimaraes and Langley, 1994;Andriopoulos and Lowe, 2000;McAdam and McClelland, 2002;Thamhain, 2003;Wood, 2003). Some authors do stress that employees need to be trained and educated before they can have a positive impact on the innovation process (Koen and Kohli, 1998;Loewe and Dominiquini, 2003;Pohlmann et al, 2005;Brennan and Dooley, 2005;Shipton et al, 2006).…”

The development and validation of the organisational innovativeness construct using confirmatory factor analysis

“…However, there is little empirical evidence in terms of development and validation of organisational innovativeness scales. Authors, such as Miller and Friesen (1983), Capon et al (1992), Avlonitis et al (1994), Guimaraes and Langley (1994), Subramanian and Nilakanta (1996), Hurley and Hult (1998), Lyon et al (2000) and North and Smallbone (2000), address the concern of measuring organisational innovativeness effectively. However, the primary focus of these studies is not scale development.…”

Development and evaluation of a three-dimensional multi-level model for visualising the workflow composite score in a health IT benchmark

“…Further investigations on the role of innovation benchmarking are necessary [22] because both views that targeted innovation came off least positive in comparison to the other views. Very often, benchmarking aims at identifying cost and quality indicators [16,48,49] , innovation has been focussed only rarely [19,21,50] . CIOs and the (other) board members need to be convinced that implementing IT innovation can entail competitive advantage in terms of better patient care and lower costs in the long run.…”