The creation of a strategy dependent innovation audit

Abstract: It is widely accepted that innovation is strongly connected to the growth and competitiveness of an organization (Cormican and O’Sullivan 2004; Aiman-Smith et al. 2005), meanwhile both practitioners and academia have expressed a lack of access to a good instrument for evaluating the performance of the same (Montoya-Weiss and Calantone 1994; Muller et al. 2005). Within this field, a number of authors have identified auditing as being appropriate method to use (Chiesa et al. 1996; Radnor and Noke 2002; Cormican and O’Sullivan 2004), although large deficiencies and constraints are identified regarding the usefulness and the usability of the existing innovation audit tools.This study is made in collaboration with ÅF AB, a leading Swedish technical consulting firm, which has expressed an interest for a tool for evaluating the innovation performance of its high-tech product development customers aimed for usage within the sales organization. Therefore, the purpose of this master thesis is to investigate the aspects of usefulness and usability in innovation auditing by developing an audit tool that identifies unrealized innovation potential in a product company’s innovation process. The tool should consider both the factor of usefulness (to make the tool situation customized) and the factor of usability (as seen from a practitioner’s perspective). Briefly, a qualitative research approach was used, carried out through five in-depth interviews with companies whose principal activity is development of high-tech products (in order to investigate the usefulness), as well as representatives from the ÅF AB’s sales organization (in order to investigate the usability).This research has explored the area of innovation auditing and has presented a result of an audit prototype with properties that no other innovation audit has, due to that it is based on a designed strategy dependent innovation framework. Choosing innovation strategy as contingency factor is appropriate since it has showed to have significant impact on the positive outcome of the innovation process (Clercq et al. 2009). Further, the success factor lies within following a chosen strategy, and does not depend on which particular strategy that is adopted (Jaruzelski et al. 2012). This research has taken the aspects of usability and usefulness in innovation auditing a step further by giving them extra focus in the development. An increased focus on usefulness makes the usage of this developed audit more adapted and applicable to companies using it (which leads to a more accurate analysis), and the focus on increased usability makes it more easy to use by practitioners. Key-words Innovation, Innovation audit, Innovation auditing, Innovation strategy