Challenges in the Current Innovation Audit Practice : KTH Master Thesis Report

Sammanfattning: Innovation is essential for the growth and survival of an organisation. Although innovation is viewed as important, managers generally have a vague sense of their company’s innovativeness and which tools that are available to evaluate their capability to innovate. Previous research state that scorecard-based innovation audit tools do have merit in evaluating an organisations capability to innovate, but that there are a number of weaknesses. Problems are raised concerning three areas, the dimensions of which the scorecard is based on, the respondent that is conducting the innovation audit, and the Likert scale which a majority of innovation audit tools are using. Problems in these areas affect the reliability and validity of the tool. The purpose of this study is to investigate the current innovation audit practices by examining employee’s perception of the tool. Further the purpose is to, with the help of literature and qualitative research, propose areas of improvements and bring forth ideas that should be taken into consideration in future development of innovation audit tools. The study is performed as a qualitative study with an iterative approach. Interviews were conducted with nine parties of interest, and the empirical data has been analysed through a thematic analysis. The result show that an organisation’s capability to innovate is hard to measure and that there exists scepticism whether or not an innovation audit tool does manage to do this. Further, problems exist within the identified areas of an innovation audit tool. These problems affect the validity and reliability of the tool. A problem is how the respondent of the innovation audit tool interpret the statements or questions, and how they interpret the scale. Another problem is the self-interest that may exist, depending on who is participating in the audit. Ideas to minimise these problems are brought forward and discussed in order to increase the validity and reliability of the innovation audit tool.