UNIVERSITY’S CONTRIBUTION TO INDUSTRIES IN THE CREATION OF A TOOL TO DIAGNOSE INNOVATION MANAGEMENT PROCESSES

Innovation in organizations is a global and recurrent development process that stimulates changes at all levels such as: structure, processes, strategies, marketing management, among others. Similarly, innovation creates several competitive advantages for the Industry. However, organizations often do not have tools and methodological frameworks that allow them to objectively measure such processes. From these reasons, there is an opportunity for collaboration between the Industries and the University, who has the knowledge and methodologies for creating such tools. This study aimed to provide organizations in the Ecuadorian context with a tool to measure innovation processes, in order to generate a more objective diagnosis within this theme. The methodology used was quantitative, associated instrument’s validation and reliability. An inventory was made, following the Oslo and Bogota’s Manuals, divided into three related questionnaires to measure Capabilities, Results and Impacts of innovation processes within organizations. This inventory was applied to 247 people from several organizations of different industries. The results of the exploratory factor analysis allowed a reduction of items distributed as follows: Impacts (2 factors, 12 items, 69.4% explained variance), Results (1 factor, 10 items, 63.9% explained variance) and Capabilities (5 factors, 25 items, 66.9% explained variance). To measure reliability, the Cronbach alpha coefficient was used, with satisfactory results for each category of innovation: (αcapabilities = 0.936, αresults = 0.935, αimpacts = 0.936). This way, our research verifies the support that the University and its academic approach can give to Industries, by creating reliable tools that allow organizations to diagnose specific processes – in this case, innovation processes – giving them a starting point for strategic management and ways to compare its status to other organizations with similar issues. As well, Universities can rely on Industries in order to have all the data they need for its studies, creating models that help to a better understanding of the context in which they perform their researches.