Decision-making Tools to Support Innovation

1The Selection of Ideas During a Creativity Workshop: An Application of PROMETHEE

Innovation arises from the ability to generate and transform an idea into products or services that are then adopted by a market. With this in mind, companies are now implementing more and more initiatives to promote the generation of ideas. Despite the development by companies in recent years of strategies and tools to systematize the innovation process, the success rate of a new product or service from the origin of the idea to the market launch remains very low (at best, one new product is created from out of roughly every 3,000 ideas; Stevens and Burley 1997). The increase in this success rate then depends on several factors: the individual and collective capacity to generate ideas, the relevant evaluation of ideas, the selection of the idea that is best suited to the context, the effective management of the development phase of the project or the realization of an appropriate marketing plan. This means that consistent and transparent decision-making in the initial stages of an innovation project can make the difference between whether that project succeeds or fails. However, making decisions at this stage can be a complex task because many possibilities are still open, while there is little information available to judge them, which makes these first steps very uncertain.

In this chapter, we will focus in particular on the selection of ideas, especially when establishing a creativity workshop. ...