A Novel Approach to Product Innovation Profiling Assessment: The I-DSM Tool

Innovation is a major driving force for the economic growth and expansion of companies and the need to innovate has become clear by now. The quality of the decisions during the design phase of a product development process is strongly connected with the assessment of the product, process and organisational innovation dimensions. The developed methodology addresses these three axes, using 30 innovation attributes, in order to obtain a product innovation profile through an innovation survey. This way a range of industry standard Innovation scores called PIP-SCORES (Product Innovation Profile scores -or innovation benchmarks) have been established. So far more than 600 companies coming from a range of industrial sectors that include creative industries, electrical/electronic, fire and safety, footwear, plastics, ceramics and textiles, have participated in this survey and their innovation profiles have been included in the database. The proposed tool benchmarks the product innovation profile of a company with the corresponding innovation scores from companies coming from the same sector. Next, the tool utilises a Design Structure Matrix, for mapping the dependencies between the Innovation Attributes. Furthermore an Innovation Improvement Impact Value for each Attribute is introduced. In order to improve the innovative profile of a company, a considerable amount of resources is needed. Provided that resources are usually limited to most companies, an optimal improvement strategy, based on the Innovation Improvement Impact values is proposed. The proposed tool (I-DSM, Innovation - Design Structure Matrix) aims at improving the innovative performance of a company, by minimizing the product development cycle and by improving the performance of the product development process.