INNOVATION MEASUREMENT BASED BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY

Abstract

Innovation has been used for an increasing number of companies as a strategy to gain competitive advantage. To foster the development of innovation, many governments have encouraged the development of business incubators. Among the types of incubators, stand out in the context of innovation, the technology-based ones which are those that work with companies that have great potential for innovation. Despite the importance of innovation in today's context, particularly related to the technology-based companies, there was no consensus in the literature regarding a set of indicators to monitor the innovation process. Knowing this context, the objective of this research is to analyse the mechanisms used to measure the technology innovation process and to propose a set of indicators to monitor this process in technology-based enterprises. To this end, an exploratory study of business incubators associated with Rede Mineira de Inovação (RMI) and of some of their incubated companies, has been done, through structured questionnaires and semi structured interviews. The research investigated the use of mechanisms to measure the innovation in technology based enterprises and verified this is an unknown issue for the majority of the respondents. Based on the problems and needs pointed out and the innovation indicators found in the studied literature, a set of innovation indicators related to control of the innovation process for these companies was proposed.