Innovation Radar - A Strategic Approach for an Innovation Development and Profitable Launch of New Product and Services

The proposed paper summarizes three years of experiences in process design and methodology implementation for innovation development as carried out by the authors during several innovation projects in different industries (e.g. fixed and mobile telecommunication, high tech, logistics). We have developed and adopted a research innovation approach called Innovation Radar to scan, recognize and evaluate early emerging business and technology trends that support the identification and creation of innovative product and services. The Innovation Radar provides an overview of the relative maturity of innovations in certain domains and weights their relevance for the company. A rating mechanism helps companies to decide when to adopt an innovation and to develop a new products and services. Furthermore, the Innovation Radar is a good strategic tool for early stage identification and prioritization in order to give an approximate value judgment without detailed return on investment justifications. In later stages of the planning process, the Innovation Radar tool can be used as a high-level summary of an underlying prioritization process.