Perception of innovation in companies - measuring the mindset of tangible and intangible innovation in companies

When talking about innovation many people think of product or process innovation, both of which are tangible types of innovation. In recent years, more focus has been directed towards intangible innovation such as business model, networking and brand innovation. This category has shown to have great impact on a firm´s long-term value creation. Still, most measurements on company innovativeness have been focused on different types of tangible innovation. Furthermore, existing models do not, to our knowledge, seize the company´s innovativeness importance and performance within the category of intangible innovation and only briefly within tangible innovation. Most companies use a predefined definition when designing innovation metrics instead of deriving from the company´s own innovation perspective and thus conclude the company´s innovativeness and recognizing the potential of innovation within the company. We have created an innovation measurement tool for firms to evaluate their company. This study has resulted in a measurement model, the Perception of Innovation in Companies model (PIC), which measures homogeneity between tangible and intangible innovation as well as differences in perceived innovativeness importance and actual performance for the company´s overall success. The model uses an emic approach and has been tested on four companies in southern Sweden. The strength with our model is that it captures the respondent´s perception of how important innovation is for the company´s overall success at the same time as it captures how well the company is performing within different types of innovation. Thus the PIC-model can aid decision makers and management.