Innovation is a complex process that has been studied from di erent perspectives. There are numerous studies, standards and reference models in the literature about it. Just a few works have been focused on covering a signi cant problem: innovation limits caused by public or private funding because of the restrictions imposed on the project in terms of scope and time. These restrictions are usually caused by the lack of trust and understanding of the innovation process by investors. In this Ph.D., the aim is to propose a framework that measures innovation maturity and capacity from ICT organizations. The initial hypothesis is that this Framework will allow improving investment since investor's risk will decrease and the trust will be increased, both, based on the maturity of the companies. The increasing of trust will eliminate the restrictions caused by nancing, making it more adapted to the needs of innovation. Besides, organizations will have a framework that will allow them to compare their innovation maturity. As regards the research strategy is concerned, this Ph.D. will follow the Design Science methodology. A framework will be designed, developed and validated in a real use case in an ICT company. The framework is intended to assist public and private investors in the nancing of ICT organizations.
Innovation is a very unusual business process, since creativity, which needs
freedom, plays a decisive role [
As innovation is implemented through projects, it is subject to the Triple
constraint or Project Management Triangle [
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). { Scope is the root idea, which arises from the discovery process. It is a novelty and has a signi cant associated risk. { Time determines whether an idea becomes an innovation. If it is not executed in time, another idea comes forward. { Cost is the fuel of the project. The funding comes to alleviate its lack, but the other two restrictions are a ected.
Innovation is a dual process [
In this Ph.D., taking as reference the Frascati and Oslo manuals [
In this work, \agile" means to be able to move quickly and easily the private and public organizations' investments towards ICT organizations to enable their research, development, and innovation. Then, to evaluate innovation capacity processes and maturity levels on ICT organizations, an iterative and increment life cycle process will be de ned following the Deming Cycle phases (plan, do, check, act). These phases will include the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of innovation evaluation plans. In these lines, a set of principles will guide the methods, techniques and/or practices included in each phase. These principles will be focused on build trust, less funding risk, fewer project restrictions, and R&D agile in time and scope.
This paper presents a Ph.D. project in the context of business innovation. It contests if the current standards and models contribute to the proper development of innovation because they do not consider such a relevant factor as funding restrictions.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 states the problem that aims to be solved in this research work. Section 3 illustrates the methodology that guides the development of this thesis. Section 4 enumerates all the artefacts that will be generated to response the objectives stated in section 2. Section 5 describes the closest research in relation to the topic treated in this research. Finally, section 6 summarizes the conclusions and states a set of future work. 2 2.1
To carry out innovation, resources (mainly money), are needed. They
constitute the third element (in addition to systematization and creativity), and it
is external to the organisation. Funding, according to the EU Green Paper on
Innovation [
Fig. 1, represents the problem statement and the Ph.D. focus. The cost is provided by investors, who due to their lack of trust, impose a series of restrictions on project time and scope. The outcome is distorted and usually remains outside the market, no longer being an innovation.
From an idea generation perspective, innovation, as a business process, must
be systematised, but it is inherently a creative process that needs agility and
freedom. This fact is considered as the Creative paradox in this Ph.D., which
has been extensively studied in numerous studies [
From an ideas execution perspective, innovation needs speed. Once an idea is created, it needs to be executed through a project as soon as possible. The maximum resources have to be provided to be executed explosively. Otherwise, its momentum will be lost. However, public aid and private investment are slow, restricted and bureaucratic processes. This fact is considered as the Implementation paradox in this thesis.
Discovery strategy is tightened by frameworks, models or standards while Development & Operations strategy is tightened by Funding (See Fig. 1).
Most studies focus on the rst part of the problem (Creative Paradox), de
ning reference models, standards or capacity assessment systems. They share a
common objective: to systematically and e ciently manage company innovation
processes to improve innovative capability and business performance[
Obstacles and restrictions are imposed by public administration and private investors when they provide resources for innovation because they lack the necessary con dence. Investors don't have an instrument to assess the maturity and trust of innovative organisations.
{ The purpose of the ISO/UNE R&D standards is not to provide trust to investors. { There are no standard de nitions, concepts and practices that measure maturity in innovation. { Restrictions on funding have not been analysed. { Investors operate on intuition rather than analysis. { There is no agility in funding. Innovation needs speed. Innovating using nancing is slow. 2.2
This Ph.D. seeks to answer the second part of the problem described above by tackling the Implementation Paradox.
The aim is to design a framework that facilitates investment, by reducing risk and increasing trust based on the maturity of ICT companies (Fig. 2). This will make the funding's models more agile and adapted to the needs of innovation. ICT companies are chosen because, overall, they have more developed innovation processes, and it seems easier to implement a rst iteration of the proposed framework. Subsequently, the framework can be scaled to any organization.
The organization's innovation maturity needs to be understood to build trust for public and private investors. By doing so, public and private investment processes will be optimized.
Innovation needs to generate ideas, and then implement them in the shortest possible time through projects. The rst phase involves creativity, the second resources. Resources come from investors, which impose a series of restrictions on the project triangle, that depend on the degree of trust with the organization. If trust is increased, the restrictions would decrease and R&D capabilities too.
Trust depends on the investor's knowledge of organizations [
Therefore, this Ph.D. aims to create a framework (integrated set of good practices) to assess the R&D maturity and capacity of ICT organizations, which will be used as a methodological scale of investor trust to agility the funding process. In addition, the framework will help organizations to develop strategic, agile and comparable R&D. The primary research objective of this Ph.D. is to investigate how innovation can be enhanced building investor's trust, through the assessing R&D maturity and capabilities in the organizations. For this purpose, a maturity innovation framework will be developed to reduce the gap between nancing models and the requirements of the innovation process. To this end, the following research questions (RQ) guide the research: { RQ1. How much important is to measure the innovation capability maturity level of an organisation? { RQ2. What is the state-of-the-art in measuring the capability maturity in terms of innovation of an organization?
RQ2.1. What methods, techniques or tools have been investigated for developing R&D in ICT organizations? RQ2.2. Which have been used for developing R&D in ICT organizations? RQ2.3. What is the nature of found results to help ICT organizations develop R&D? RQ2.4. What are the objectives pursued in research to help ICT organizations develop R&D? { RQ3. What key performance indicators should be considered to measure the innovation maturity level of an organization? { RQ4. How should a capability maturity framework be to enhance investment on ICT organizations? { RQ5. How can the capability maturity framework be evaluated? 3
In the literature, there are many publications on research methodologies for both
natural and social sciences. In this Ph.D., the Design Science research
methodology will be followed. This research methodology was provided by Johannesson
and Perjons [
Executing the activities. Selecting research strategies and methods to be used in the activities.
Relating the research to an existing knowledge base.
The method framework includes ve main activities that range from problem
investigation and requirements de nition, through artefact design and
development, and nally, to demonstration and evaluation. In addition, this PhD thesis
won't undertake all of the ve activities of the method framework in depth.
Instead, this PhD thesis will focus on one or two of the activities, while the others
are treated more lightly. Then, this PhD thesis will follow a Problem-Focused
Design Science Research combined by a Requirements- and Development-Focused
Design Science Research. The rest of the activities will undertake lightly. Figure
3 shows the main activities and artefacts that will be obtained in each activity.
Based on the identi ed problem that there are no approaches to increase investor
con dence in R&D and that current investment conditions distort results, a
wide variety of Design Science activities and contributions have already been
identi ed, which are summarized below:
{ A Delphi study [
Concerning the proposal presented in this work, to evaluate the capacity and maturity of ICT organizations in the context of R&D, some related works are described below.
Berg [
Several proposals study how to evaluate the innovation capacity in projects
or companies [
On the other hand, Raghuvanshi et al. [
Finally, standards that references to maturity and/or capability assessment related to this topic of this Ph.D. are described in Table 2. All of them, present a super cial description, and the need to measure maturity is not developed, nor does it o er frameworks for this purpose.
The biggest di erence of this proposal, with respect to the related work described above lies in that they do not enough consider the critical factor that investors have in innovation processes. R&D maturity models proposed ignore the gap produced by the barriers that investors cause due to their lack of con dence. Therefore, a framework that helps to increase investor con dence is necessary to decrease the restrictions applied to projects when they are nanced. 6
This paper presents a Ph.D. approach to enhance the innovation process in
ICT organizations. It focuses on the gap that public or private funding leads
to distortions in the execution of innovation projects. For this purpose, Design
Science [
To validate the problem statement asked in RQ1, a Delphi study [
To sum up, this Ph.D. contributes to the knowledge base of software development by providing a capability maturity framework that o ers an organisation the possibility to know its maturity level and compare it with other organisations.
This research has been supported by the Pololas project (TIN2016-76956-C32-R) of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. In addition, I would like to recognize my PhD supervisors, Dr. Francisco Jose Dom nguez Mayo and Dr. Jose Gonzalez Enr quez, for their ongoing support as I progress through the doctoral program.