Establishing a Practical Company Innovative Benchmark

Innovation is a major driving force for the economic growth and expansion of companies and the need to innovate has become clear by now. SME’s , even if they are very well aware of the importance of innovation have been rather slow in adopting tools and techniques used in larger companies, which often are very difficult or even impossible to be applied to them. This paper presents a new tool which can very easily be applied in SMEs for benchmarking their innovation process. In the first part of this paper, the most commonly used measures of Innovation are presented, and the difficulties in applying them to SMEs are described. Next, we tackle the Innovation survey approaches and the use of Benchmarking, always from the SMEs point of view. In the second part we present our methodology, the PIP-SCORE (Product Innovation Profile -SCORE), which is based on measuring and benchmarking innovation, through an innovation survey. We aim at improving innovative performance of SME, by measuring innovation and determining a product innovation profile. This is achieved by addressing three inter-related, but separately measurable, aspects of a company’s innovation processthe products (or services) developed; the innovation process utilized; the way the product innovation process is project managed. The results indicate areas of acceptance and possible corrective actions. By resolving the mentioned three axes values we acquire a final pip-score. This value represents the “innovationness” of the company in a specific sector. We conclude by presenting the innovation profile of the creative industries sector, as an example, taking a sample of 100 creative industries which are included in the PIPSCORE database.