Idea assessment and selection in product innovation – the empirical research results

The process of innovation takes significant resources, and therefore it is of great importance for companies to recognize the ideas with high innovation capacity as early as possible, and in a transparent manner, with the least necessary amount of expert knowledge. Current research indicates that companies often carry out the selection of ideas ad hoc or intuitively, and that only a small number of companies have defined the methods for ideas assessment and evaluation. In doing so, such problems as imprecise definition of the variables used in the evaluation process of the innovation capacities of ideas, undefined metrics and interaction variables will arise. In order to determine the practical points of view in this area, a study was conducted in the form of a survey on a representative sample of Croatian companies which have product innovation in their production program. The survey is aimed at determining what motivates companies to innovate, and the ways in which companies carry out the assessment and selection of ideas. Through a thorough study of the literature, a set of variables that are commonly used in the idea capacities assessment for product development have been defined, and the survey tried to establish the practical significance of individual variables for the participants of the process. This paper presents the results of the study.