Identifying Relationships Between Eco-innovation and Product Success - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 169

economic, social, and ecological aspects (Hansen et al. 2009 ; Paech 2007 ), so that
they become integrated into the design of new products, processes, and organiza-
tional structures (Rennings 2000 ; Klewitz and Hansen 2014 ).
The aim of this research is to develop an approach that identifies the
relationships between the success of new eco-products and the key factors in the
field of project management and eco-innovation implementation that influence this
success. The proposed model contains data from Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP) systems and questionnaires concerning implementation of eco-innovation.
Human statements are often based on subjective judgments that can be expressed
in an imprecise form. One of the techniques that can be operated with the notation
of linguistic variables is fuzzy set theory, which has been chosen to describe the
subjective judgments of interviewees.
The originality of this research concerns the proposed model for measur-
ing the success of an eco-product that takes into account the structure of an ERP
system and subjective judgments concerning eco-innovation implementation.
The proposed methodology enables the identification of key success factors of a
product on the basis of the qualitative and quantitative data that may be stored in
an ERP system or collected through questionnaires. The relationships between
eco-innovation and success of a product are sought with the use of artificial neural
networks and can be used for forecasting the success of products that are in the
development process, as well as for proposing changes in project management that
can increase the chance of developing a successful product.
The remaining sections of this chapter are organised as follows: Sect. 2
presents the measurement of innovation capacity, sustainability in the con-
text of innovation, and elements of eco-innovation implementation. A model
of measuring innovation in the context of an ERP database and sustainability-
oriented innovations is described in Sect. 3 . A methodology for forecasting the
success of a product is shown in Sect. 4 . An illustrative example of the proposed
methodology, which presents the description of eco-product implementation with
the use of fuzzy weights, identification of relationships in company's database,
and the use of the sought relationships for forecasting and if-what analysis, is pre-
sented in Sect. 5 . Finally, some concluding remarks are contained in Sect. 6 .
2 Background
2.1 Measurement of Innovation Capacity
Many approaches have been proposed to measure the innovation management of
companies and identify the conditions of a successful innovation process (Guan
et al. 2006 ; Wang et al. 2008 ; Chiesa et al. 2009 ; Boly et al. 2014 ). Table 1 pre-
sents selected approaches to innovation capacity metrics.
The literature review on innovation capacity metrics summarised in Table 1
shows that the majority of the proposed approaches is based on the evaluation