Do R&D and marketing departments perceive innovation fundamentals through the same lenses?

Abstract

Todaypsilas competitive world, no matter what industry we are considering, has innovation as a key element for the survival and growth of firms. The product development process tends to be central to the sustainability of firms, emerging the need of top management and the different departments to focus on innovation and to perceive this same objective as a common path which has to be taken together. The literature stresses that Marketing and R&D, the leading departments on the innovation process within firms, have to work jointly to achieve the market success of the innovative product. Usually, this stream of the literature discusses the integration issue focusing essentially on the outcomes - failure/success factors of the innovation process - derived from the (lack of) integration between these departments. In the present paper we assess how close are the perceptions of these departments on the innovation process through the use of an innovation audit. To our knowledge, no study has used the innovation audit to assess the integration of Marketing and R&D departments. The study was applied to a set of key actors within the Marketing and R&D departments of a Portuguese beverage firm. Being a case study, due to the limitation of its sample, it evidences an actual divergence of global perceptions regarding to the firmpsilas innovation process and performance. These results highlights the need for departmentspsila integration not only on the outcomes, but they also indicate that a big effort should be employed in order to close perceptionpsilas gaps on Strategy, Process, Linkages, Learning and Organization, i.e. the fundamentals of innovation, namely by improving intra- and interdepartmental communication.