INMATE-Innovation Management Technique - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 432

Figure 4. INMATE methodology

that can reduce the pre-innovation rents of
the firms much more than reducing its post-
innovation rents. In other words, competition
can enhance incremental profits of innova-
tion, and, therefore, encourage investment
geared to “ escape from competition ”;
c) Innovation does not correlate to the size of
the organization. It can be processed either
within the large, or the medium or the small
size enterprises, being it a start up, a spin-
off, or being generated from a technology
transfer;
d) Innovation is a multidisciplinary process
that could emerge anywhere inside the
organization. In order to happen it is nec-
essary to allow the convergence of distinct
knowledge, competences and cultures, and
in so doing, gathering them, in a continu-
ous and interactive way, to the innovation
development process;
e) Innovation must align technical rationality
(which is geared towards success) to com-
municative rationality (which is related to
the understanding of the parties involved)
of the same process.

tion management tools and proper human capital
formation for this management.
After a benchmark research on the current
market tools, the INMATE methodology was
conceptualized and developed in the form that
is presented in Figure 4. Its main objective is to
provide a tool in which enterprises, organizations
and institutions could comprehend the diverse
dimensions of the innovation process, and could,
by themselves, take strategic decisions that best fit
to their own interests. The INMATE methodology
is based on the following assumptions:

a) Innovation is a process of perception and
generation of opportunities. It is the result of
a culture (entrepreneurial, organizational, or
institutional) geared to the new, the disrup-
tive, and different. It can be a systematic or
a non-systematic process, depending on the
context in which it reveals;
b) Innovation is an incentive sensitive process,
mainly the economic ones. In the past it was
believed that innovation could decline with
competition, as long as more competition
reduced monopoly rents that yielded suc-
cessful innovators. Today it is perceived that
the incentives of innovation depend not only
to the innovationex-post per se, but much
more to the difference between post and
pre-innovation rents. Hence, competition can
foster innovation and growth due to the fact

The implementation of the INMATE methodol-
ogy starts from what is called the design problem ,
i.e., the problem of selecting (or designing) the
innovationstrategy , followed by the definition of
the organization that could achieve the highest
performance in the context where the innovation
takes place. Assuming as its starting point the
perception of a business opportunity, the strategy
is selected to explore such an opportunity. Hence,
an organization should be established (and man-
aged ) by properly specifying the Know-What
(what to do), the Know-How (how to do it), and
the Know-Who (with whom to do it).
Besides the innovation strategy and the orga-
nization management, INMATE incorporates four
other dimensions. Due to the information overload
characteristic of the Information Era, in the current
economy it is vital to any innovation process to