A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW ON FIRM-LEVEL INNOVATION MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

摘要

Innovation management has been defined as a set of organizational routines and activities aimed at developing a culture for innovation. As it can be expected, these routines and activities vary enormously among industries and firms. The systematic management of innovation at firm-level becomes even more complex when one considers the multiple interrelations and cooperative activities that occur in an increasingly open innovation paradigm. For these reasons, all kinds of models and proposals for firm-level innovation management have been proposed throughout the years. Some are fairly generic, while others are either industry- or firm-specific. Moreover, some models consider only what is within the firm's boundaries, while others consider its relationships with the whole business ecosystem. Finally, some models approach innovation from a product development perspective, while others concentrate on process innovation. As a result, there has been much confusion about what is and what constitutes an innovation management system. In fact, with few exceptions that are either limited in scope or level of analysis, no comprehensive systematic literature reviews on firm-level innovation management systems have been conducted. In this context, this paper presents partial results of a systematic review of published literature regarding innovation management systems. A total of 642 works were analysed by three researchers. In particular, this paper focuses on 27 of the 102 most relevant works. The main outcome is a tentative interpretative framework of innovation management systems that critically highlights and discusses their most common elements and aspects: an innovation process and elements that drive or support innovation. Implications for theory and practice are drawn from this taxonomy, including suggestions on how to use the proposed model for implementing a firm-level innovation management system.