Innovation Management Software Exploiting Multiple Criteria Analysis: The Case of Innovation Centre of Crete

Innovation is a critical factor in building an organization’s culture of growth. Provided that it is properly blended with organizational development initiatives and aligned with the organization’s strategy, it supplies a compelling advantage for the growth process. Neglecting to encompass innovation in an organization’s culture could lead to shrinkage and even extinction, in the case of an intensively competitive market. Executive staff must consider innovative technologies and be aware of all growth opportunities. However, this staff is stressed under information overload. A need exists to reduce the information load and filter available technologies according to the specific needs of the organization. In this paper, the authors propose a recommendation approach to match the needs of an organization against existing technologies (innovative products or services). The organization expresses its customized needs by declaring its preferences over a small reference set of indicative technologies. Each technology is characterized by multiple attributes, in a way that the organization ultimately expresses the trade-offs between the attributes’ significance weights. This information is used to create the organization’s profile. The profile guides a recommendation process, according to which available technologies are evaluated against the profile and proposed to the organization in a descending order.