Developing an assessment tool for innovation of product and service systems

SMEs rarely have a pre-defined pattern for the conceiving and the development of innovative solutions. Most innovation management steps rely on designers' and managers' intuition with no structured path to generating ideas. Especially in turbulent economic environments companies need to efficiently choose the most promising ideas in order to effectively allocate internal resources for innovation. What is proposed in this paper is a platform of tools supporting managers in different steps of the innovation process, from the identification of company innovation requirements up to the assessment of innovation ideas and of their coherence with company strategy. SMEs developing integrated solutions where products and services are developed together are the best addressees of the tool. A multi-criteria methodology based on self-assessment is the conceptual framework of the here-described set of tools.