New generation of innovation management: an integrated framework for the digital era

Abstract

The present research highlights the main developments in the generations of innovation management models and systems. Innovation defined as the process of transforming ideas into marketable products or services is vitally important to the industry since it can produce value to the customers and generate revenue for producers. The research aim is to develop a novel generation innovation framework for future digital economy which defines the lifecycle from idea generation to commercialization, illustrating the factors affecting such development and considering the current socio-economic environment, evolution of business processes, technological advancements and market trends. A questionnaire is designed and administered to professionals in industry to elicit their feedback that can be used to validate the framework and to assess its usefulness to organisations. This questionnaire is an essential part of the research methodology. The questions are formulated in a format that allows a pair-wise comparison highlighting the item`s relative importance. Adequate guidance on answering questions is provided. The proposed innovation framework is applied to collect data and to carry out a pair-wise comparison between the components of the main criteria and sub-criteria. It triggers the innovation processes required to handle the demand-pull and to consider the digitalisation push. The model is validated utilizing the practitioner’s contributions from seven countries, namely; the UK, UAE, USA, Germany, Japan, China, and Canada, The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is utiliesed, combining both quantitative and qualitative methods. The impact of digitalisation-push and of the demand-pull are considered as main criteria, with many sub-criteria associated with each criterion. The findings confirmed that the proposed framework is useful to industry professionals and organisations that focus on creating value for the customer who has become more aware of and demanding regarding lead time delivery services, product availability, and reliability. The model can also be applied to test the ideas of experts to obtain the appropriateness of the innovation framework for manufacturing, firms, and organisations.