Developing an approach to measure innovation performance in collaborative networks

Innovation is often addressed to be the result of collaborative network settings. Yet it remains difficult to provide proof in hard measurement data. Mainly motivated by practicability of data collection the paper proposes the “innovation alley” as a measurement approach. We discuss its conceptual and theoretical assumptions, first with a view on the network or mezo-level of analysis, second by presenting a longitudinal process basic structure which is well in line with existing product development management knowledge. We then elicit conceptual links to entrepreneurship for methodological reasons of measuring innovation performance. The “innovation alley” model is structured as a theoretical process of six steps with indicators at every stage to collect data on innovation performance. We include very specific network agents such as the ESNC and the concept of Living Labs in our model to evaluate their role and performance in the overall innovation process.