Early Supplier Integration: Assessing Supplier Innovation Ideas

For this paper, a benchmarking analysis was conducted to determine best practices for the evaluation and selection of supplier innovations as part of the purchasing process. All of the case companies analyze the quality of an innovation, but they do not evaluate the supplier proposing the innovation. To further develop these results, a World Café workshop was conducted. Two operationally usable checklists were developed to evaluate the characteristics and qualities of both the innovation and the supplier proposing the innovation. Both checklists can be combined into one evaluation-scoring model for supplier innovations. This process helps avoid wasting time attempting to implement 'good' ideas from 'bad' suppliers or discarding 'bad' ideas from 'good' suppliers that may still have potential for further development.