KPIs to Manage Innovation Processes in VEEs Initial Thoughts and Results

While enterprise collaboration has become a significant factor to achieve business success, the distributed structure of virtual enterprise environments still carries new challenges towards successful operation of business processes within these networks. As one group of business process, innovation processes do challenge virtual enterprises to a much higher degree, because new products and services are target point. This paper discusses the utilization of key performance indicators to enable and to support the continuous flow of information between the collaborators. They are essential towards successful innovation processes and their usability in managing these processes. As the predicted impact and outcome are essential factors, the manageability of ongoing innovation processes decreases with its rising innovative potential and level of uncertainty. The performance indicators raised by each enterprise of the network are highly divertive. This presents another challenge to the management of these distributed innovation processes, which may be met by partial unification and ICT based communication platforms.