Front-end idea generation for innovation: empirical evidence from German industrial corporations

Summary form only given. The generally used measures of technical and economic success in new product development studies are concerned with the overall outcome of the innovation process. These measures are difficult to relate to the initiative as these measures can only be applied towards the end of the innovation process. At this point success or failure of an innovation does not only rely on the initiative but on several other interfering factors. In order to evaluate the success of the initiative we suggest that a more complex measure of initiative be applied. We propose that measures of efficiency can be based on the understanding of initiatives as consisting of different degrees of specification. The relation of the degree of specification and the final solution obtained determines initiative efficiency. Although this relation can be based on the overall outcome of the initiative we suggest a more differentiated approach by measuring along five dimensions that describe the initiative. We employ this measure in a multivariate analysis of cross-sectional data on German industrial corporations applying for the "Innovationspreis der Deutschen Wirtschaft" in 1999. A set of 101 projects for an innovative product or process are included in our analysis. To identify types of initiatives we used a cluster analysis on the quality dimensions of initiatives. We found empirical evidence for the existence of three different qualitative types of initiatives