Individual Innovation Incentives

Sammanfattning: Issue of study: Today, in an information-driven economy, it is more important than ever to be innovative. Developing new ways to create and deliver value is the main method of competition in the business world. Although the picture differs widely from the industrial age, the principals used to manage these companies and employees are same as a century ago. Paying people will just make them do what you tell them to. In order to realize their full potential you need their participation and full dedication. Today your employees are your only bottleneck and the undisputed key to your success. Realizing their potential is maximizing your potential. This can only be done through motivation. Purpose (1) Investigate and describe incentive systems within companies defined as pioneers regarding the innovation process. (2) Describe the systems according to new theory. (3) Generalize the incentive systems into trends and analyze these trends according to the diffusion theory. Method: The research has been conducted through case studies on six companies active within innovation networks. Data has been gathered during two steps; a shorter telephone interview and a longer face-to-face interview. The compilation of the research data has been analyzed with motivation and diffusion theory. Conclusions: We have in our thesis isolated five trends regarding motivation for innovation among our respondents, who consist of Sweden’s top innovators. We have created a theoretical framework to describe, compare and evaluate these trends. We have then mapped each trend’s current maturity and predicted their future development and adoption. During this work we have unveiled the effectiveness – efficiency paradox, greatly affecting companies’ innovation work.