Scenario planning for innovation development: an overview of different innovation domains

Innovations expressed by customers are often unstructured, unclear, and ambiguous, making it difficult to interpret customers’ contributions, integrate them into a company’s R&D department and transfer them into comprehensible requirements for the development of product, service or software innovations. In order to close this gap, the paper presents scenarios as a technique to support the communication between customers and developers along the R&D process and to reduce feedback cycles. A basic understanding of scenarios and their application in innovation management is delivered by outlining scenario definitions, identifying dimensions for the classification of scenarios, and providing an overview of scenario representation techniques for different innovation domains.