Explorative Study on Measurement of Innovation

Abstract: The interplay between innovation and measurement has fascinated scholars from several disciplines over the last decade. All these diverse contributions, however, have resulted in a current state of knowledge that is signified by large numbers of articles without clear integration and synthesis. Therefore the aim of this explorative thesis is to examine the theoretical and empirical notions of innovation and measurement. The research consist of the findings of three studies presented in three appended papers. The first study is a systematic literature review that provides a state of the art of innovation and measurement and provides a synthesis and integration of the theoretical notions. The second study explores the innovation and measurement empirically by means of a survey. Here, it is explored how management accountant practitioners perceive innovation, how important they regard innovation measurement is and the specific metrics they use to assess innovation. This will result in a state of the practice for innovation measurement. The third study is a case study that focuses on understanding how innovation KPIs are used in an organization. The research contributes to the area of innovation and measurement by theoretically and empirically exploring, describing and understanding how innovation is actually measured. The thesis has used validated methods and tools to systematically and empirically map the state of knowledge in the area thus far. The contribution of the first paper is exploring the theoretical foundations and definitions of innovation measurement. The second paper is more focused on the perception of innovation from a practitioners ‘point of view. In extension to these papers, paper three tries to provide a real-life case example of how innovation measures and measurement works in practices and raise understanding of actual usage of innovation measurement.