Towards measuring the success of innovations

Thirty extensive empirical investigations have been compared in terms of how they measure the success or failure of innovations. It is noted that there is far from a consensus on the standards of measurement. There are important differences in the scope and the attributes of measurement, the stage of the process at which the success is measured, the standards of comparison, and the choice of persons who assess the success of the innovation. Consequently, there are not only difficult problems of reliability, but also of validity. It is found that the investigations cannot be compared, though they are subsumed under the same headline. Starting from this analysis, a concept for the measurement of the success of innovations is developed with the object of measuring the success at all stages of the innovation process