A Strategy for Building Sustainable Innovation Excellence – A Danish Study

The purpose of this paper is to report on the development of a methodology and an associated measurement instrument for diagnosing innovation excellence, and to show how this methodology was applied in a case study. The conceptual model behind the measurement instrument has been developed based on the specific enabler criteria and criteria parts from the European Excellence Model adapted to the innovation area. The areas to address (= the key performance indicators) under each criterion is the result of a comprehensive study of innovation literature combined with the case company’s experiences from a relatively new established technology center.

In the literature study and model building section (section 1) a strategic model for building sustainable innovation excellence will be developed by going through a simplification process. The starting point for this simplification process is a previous study where the European Excellence Model was adapted to innovation and new product development. The resulting model which is called the “4P” model will be discussed further in section 2, followed by a presentation and discussion on the epistemology and ontology in section 3. Then a simple approach for measuring and diagnosing innovation excellence will be presented in section 4 and the results by using this approach will be presented and discussed in section 5. The paper will then be finalized in section 6 with final discussions and validation of the “4P” model.