MEASURING INNOVATION POWER OF BUSINESSES: A REGIONAL RESEARCH IN FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL INDUSTRY

In today’s terms economic growth and competitiveness are based on innovation increasingly. Innovation is considered as a fundamental component of the entrepreneurship and sustainable development. Countries need innovative enterprises and also pioneer companies in this field for being included to international race and attaining competitive advantage. These companies have to apply right measurements and incentives, and have to generate right attitude with right strategies both inside and outside the company to make innovation is managed. For a healthy process of innovation management, it is very important to perform a serious planning and implementation, to create awareness of innovation inside the company, to bring innovation into the corporate culture and to measure the power of innovation at regular intervals in this process. In the principle of ‘You cannot manage what you cannot measure’, with the data and feedback that obtain through measurements, enterprises can determine their strengths and weaknesses in this field and they can provide continuity a successful innovation process. In this study; innovation concept and its importance for enterprises and companies, some of the innovation measurement models have been emphasized, and Arthur D. Little’s innovation measurement models have been analyzed, and one of them has been practiced in the agriculture and food sectors in Salihli province. The findings have shown that, innovation power of a company or enterprise is not influenced by the size of company, the age of company, the field of activity or the company’s annual turnover. As highlighted in the literature of the study, innovation is possible for every business and enterprise with applying the right processes.