Innovation and decision making: Understanding selection and prioritization of development projects

This paper examines the problems decision makers experience when selecting and prioritizing new ideas and development projects. It is based on an explorative study, with interviews carried out in three companies that have new product development as a core competitive factor.The findings indicate that to deal with all the situations and problems that may arise in the innovation process, various approaches for making decisions and understanding innovation are needed. However, regardless of the appropriateness of these approaches for given circumstances, they receive different levels of acceptance at an organizational plane. This puts decision makers in the conflictive situation of sometimes having to use approaches to work that are appropriate but not accepted, and other times accepted but inappropriate. Furthermore, an organization´s potential to create new products, and consequently its future competitiveness, depends on how its members deal with the organizational acceptance of the approaches used. We discuss the implications of these findings for designing work procedures for selecting and prioritizing ideas and projects.