Quantifying and Leading Innovation with TRIZ Within Competitiveness Strategies

Abstract

The most prominent tool for analyzing the competitive advantage of organizations or larger ecosystems is the Porter’s diamond. This paper investigates a systematic way to build up the Porter’s diamond model, including the relationships between the building blocks—which was not yet treated in the current published papers. The framework is based on SWOT analysis, as well as on relationship and correlation matrices to show the connections between Porter’s diamond blocks. With the methodology proposed in this paper new dimensions of the diamond are explicitly revealed. This creates a new space to identify conflicts and quantify critical issues within the strategy. TRIZ tackles the conflicts revealed by the links in the diamond and proposes generic directions to operationalize the strategy. The major finding of this research is that without a structured depiction and deployment of each diamond’s block with the other blocks, many areas that require innovations and innovative projects can be easily omitted, making the strategy weaker. Findings in the paper are sustained by qualitative conclusions extracted from methodology application on an IT economic cluster. Results show that the proposed methodology brings advantages in defining a comprehensive analysis of the competitive environment, as well as in linking analysis with innovation. With the methodology proposed in this paper, information from the Porter’s diamond can be used in a more effective way for building up a strategy for economic competitiveness.