Which way an idea has to go through an organisation to be successful at the end? Is it possible to reconstruct this journey? Can conclusions be drawn for future projects?
The retrospective evaluation of innovation projects is highly promising for organisations because conclusions can be drawn about typical processes and pitfalls. If the results are consolidated at the organisational level, typical patterns can be identified with regard to sources, implementation conditions, participants, duration and completion of innovation projects.
Procedure
For this purpose, an interview guideline was developed at artop based on a survey of individual project steps. An Innovation project is split into distinct parts and the content, the result, the duration and the number of participants are analyzed. The result is visualized on a timeline using metaplan technology. Subsequently, for each project step it should be indicated how satisfied the interviewee was with the project at that time and how great he/she considers the prospects of success of the idea to be. This is followed by further questions on the interfaces in the process of implementing ideas and on the general innovation process at various degrees of abstraction.
After that, the data can be evaluated at the level of the individual project. Now, the process of the project is of interest, especially the stages when delays and conflicts occurred. This is useful in order to be able to counteract the imminent consequences. If similar reasons accumulate in other interviews, the organisation can prevent such problems in the future.
In addition, the general conditions under which such projects are implemented are of interest here. Now it is possible to see typical hurdles at the beginning of a project, during the implementation and at the end.
Effort and benefit
The method requires at least one hour of pure discussion time. In addition, there are expenses for follow-up, data analysis and mirroring. In comparison with other common methods from organisational research, innovation project analysis is a complementary instrument that focuses less on breadth (such as employee surveys in questionnaire format) than on a great depth of detail and deliberately addresses the process instead of the result (such as benchmark analyses).
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