Making supplier innovation success more certain: Evaluating, selecting and embedding supplier innovations

Innovations are central sources of competitive advantage, and effective Innovation management processes are crucial to ensure that organizations survice and prosper. However, in practice, a very high percentage of all innovation projects fail. According to previous research, there are two main reasons for this high failure rate: (1) bad innovation project evaluation and selection and (2) poor and slow innovation project execution. Simultaneously, nowadays, most innovations are provided and invented by suppliers (and no longer internally at the buying company). Surprisingly, this fact is mainly neglected in existing innovation management approaches, which mostly focus on internally generated innovations.

This dissertation provides three main contributions to change this situation and enable companies to increase the innovation project success. Firstly, nine evaluation criteria for supplier innovations (five to evaluate the innovative idea and four to evaluate the innovative supplier) are developed. Secondly, a method consisting of two tools to execute the evaluation and selection of supplier is provided. The first tool is a scoring model (containing the nine evaluation criteria), which assesses the innovation idea from two sides-the idea quality and the supplier quality. The second tool is a matrix that visualizes the evaluation scores and can be used to execute the selection decision. Finally, this dissertation provides suggestions for optimizing the innovation implementation process in context with supplier innovations and introduces a new promotor team (consisting of three newly developed promotors) to enable an optimized execution of supplier innovation projects.