Evaluation of Innovation Management in Developing Countries: A Comparative Study PDF

Keywords

Benchmarking Developing Countries, Innovation management, Innovation management evaluation, Innovation auditing.

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the management of technological innovation in one of the largest petrochemical companies in Saudi Arabia and to illustrate how to benchmark the results with the innovation management of other organizations. The evaluation consisted of five dimensions: strategy, processes, innovative organization, linkages and learning. The results showed that the Saudi Company has top management commitment and support for innovation, the learning dimension is very well managed, the company is committed to the development of its employees worldwide and the innovation system is flexible. The results also showed that the linkages and process dimensions ranked in the middle and the innovative organization and strategy dimensions have lower ranks. The results were compared with two Brazilian companies: “Arinos” and “Poly Easy”; and two Chinese companies: “Guizhou YiBai Pharmaceutical” and “Huagong Tools”. These companies are not similar to the Saudi Company in so many aspects; however, the comparisons were made for illustration reasons only in order to illustrate how it could be implemented and how to use the results to benchmark innovation management in organizations. The comparisons results revealed that the Saudi Company was doing better in several dimensions. It was 6.7% better than Guizhou YiBai Pharmaceutical Company in the process dimension and better than Arinos in the linkages and learning dimensions by 10% and 0.57% respectively. Some of the gaps between the Saudi Company and the average of the two Chinese companies and the average of the two Brazilian companies were small and could easily be closed.