The objective of an innovation audit is to obtain information on the current situation of the company vis-à-vis innovation, analyzing whether or not activities of this type are being carried out and, if so, how they are being carried out and the results that are they are getting.
Innovation involves much more than research and development and creating new products. It implies the improvement of production processes (lower costs or improve the work situation of employees), innovative organizational structures (cluster), and their interaction between companies and institutions, new services, change in the ways of using a given product, new business models framed in the local environment. (See types of innovation)
Latin American companies, especially SMEs, present deficiencies mainly in the poor structure of the processes that involve innovation, as well as ignorance of the main influencing factors, in order to discover and use the innovative potential they possess (creative employees, cooperation with local universities, ideas of clients and suppliers, network of companies, state), in a systematic way, and corresponding to the needs of the organization and society, to avoid investing resources in projects that are not viable or for which it is not the precise moment, as usually happens in universities and large companies: investment in research without a defined objective.
Innovation Audit - Innoaudit: Allows the evaluation of the current innovative capacity of an organization (private or public) or cluster of companies, through evaluation indicators, which allow determining, first of all, the external pressure that the organization has to innovate (customers, suppliers, status), and secondly, the structure of the organization based on the processes that have to do with the development of innovations, and determine which processes exist, which would be necessary to include, which to improve, their efficiency and what tools are necessary for it.
All the actors participate in the evaluation (clients, suppliers, universities, regional state), in order to have all the sources of ideas in the system. In this way it is possible to analyze, evaluate the actual current situation of the activities carried out by the company, which have to do with innovation processes, such as improving and exploiting all the potential present, and introducing new processes, tools and specific improvements that allow increasing the innovative capacity of these SMEs, covering all aspects of innovation management, for example:
1. Collection, selection and evaluation of new ideas
2. Evaluation of the competences of the members of the organization
3. Use of creativity techniques
4. Cooperation agreements with universities and companies in the sector (joint research and development, birth of student companies).
5. Contact with customers and suppliers
6. Joint work with the community (students, microentrepreneurs, freelancers)
7. For states: redesign of training offers at universities, adapting them to the local environment
8. The motivation of the participants to collaborate with ideas.
