Identifying Relationships Between Eco-innovation and Product Success - Technology Management for Sustainable Production and Logistics - page 173

batteries), eco-product implementation focuses mainly on a product's life cycle
in order to reduce environmental impact. According to Pujari et al. ( 2004 ), prod-
uct life cycle analysis involves all aspects of a product from its creation, through
its use, to its disposal.
The above-described dimensions of eco-innovation implementation constitute a
model of measuring innovation that is elaborated in the next section.
3 Model of Measuring Innovation
In general there are two approaches to collect data concerning innovation and use
it to the measurement of innovation. The first is connected with benchmarking and
the second with the internal assessment of innovation performance in a company.
Benchmarking allows a company to compare its performance, relative to an aver-
age or to other firms. It leads to better understanding of the company's current
practices and makes use of systematic comparison of practices and performance
with those of others, in order to develop improvement actions and sustain com-
pany innovativeness for long-term growth (Maravelakis et al. 2006 ). However, the
usefulness of benchmarking is limited by the gathering of reliable data concerning
competition. Self-assessment of measures of innovation may also be prone to bias
but are based on data from the company (e.g. financial statements, bill of costs,
employees' statements) and seem to be more objective than benchmarking, there-
fore, this approach is further considered.
Data for measuring eco-innovation can be collected from questionnaires (con-
cerning for instance innovation-oriented learning, organizational techniques,
communication in new product development, etc.) or retrieved from a company's
information system (e.g. from an ERP database). ERP systems operate, collect and
store data connected with the daily activities of enterprises (e.g. production orders)
as well as information on previous product development projects (Relich 2013 ). In
recent years, the advancement of information technology in business management
processes has placed ERP system as one of the most widely implemented business
software tools in various enterprises. The use of an ERP system is especially sig-
nificant in production enterprises, in which the number of operational processes is
enormous. A typical ERP system consists of modules that reflect the activity of an
enterprise, e.g. sales and marketing, purchasing and material management, manu-
facturing, R&D, accounting and finance (May et al. 2013 ).
The proposed model consists of variables that describe product success in terms
of its innovativeness (output data) and variables that are suspected of having sig-
nificant impact on product success (input data). The model has been elaborated
on the basis of a previous study that included observation of successful compa-
nies and analysis of literature (see Table 1 ) as well as from the perspective of data
stored in an ERP system, including the project management module. The use of an
ERP system in the context of the product innovation process and product life cycle
is presented in Fig. 1 . Data concerning production, logistics (including materials