THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN THE INNOVATION ROADMAPS OF HIGH-TECH ORGANIZATIONS Enabling early involvement of Procurement in the New Product Development & Launch (NPDL) activities at Royal Philips

High-tech multinational organizations face fierce competition within the global economic and commercial arena. This is not a recent discovery; this has been an ongoing reality ever since the start of the post-industrialization era. To remain competitive and outpace their rivals, large organizations have to innovate and introduce new ideas and products to the market. This is achievable by executing their long term strategy based on their innovation roadmaps, which involve the compilation of all running and planned research and development activities across different businesses. The ultimate goal of innovation is to create value for the customers, and this cannot be an attainable goal without the influential presence of technology across the end-to-end process. This thesis provides an assessment of the role of Information Technology in enabling multinational high-tech organizations to successfully drive innovation activities. IT makes this process feasible not only by guaranteeing a continuous flow of information within the established innovation roadmaps but also by giving strength to organizational functions other than R&D, such as Procurement, to be impactful business partners. However, if the way of organizing and managing the structure of Information Technology is unstructured, cross-functional collaboration is hindered, and thus, the performance of New Product Development (NPD) initiatives may be inadequate and the final outputs may deliver suboptimal value to the customers. The report follows the methodology of case study research. Both practical and theoretical concerns trigger the formulation of two main research questions. A comprehensive literature review follows, giving already some insights to the addressed questions. Then, Royal Philips is selected as a case company and data collection is conducted by extensive interviews with 14 professionals who equally represent the two communities of Innovation and Procurement. The approach is purely qualitative and serves to strengthen what is already discovered by the literature examination as well as to place the researcher in an argumentative position to develop valid conclusions. The initially identified research gaps and practical problems are considerably confronted by the final findings and recommendations. The plethora of internal and external standards that delineate the innovation processes need the presence of a robust Quality Management System. Highly diverse Information Systems should be integrated in order to increase the visibility of all the activities that take place in the innovation roadmaps, for all cross-functional teams. Moreover, the IT solution that was implemented in the case company for tracking innovation projects shows that multinational high-tech organizations can monitor the performance of NPD on a real-time basis. The research also shows that there are IT services in the market that can tackle the massive frequency of changes across innovation schemes. Last but not least, Procurement, when empowered by technology, can play a very critical role in the early decision making in innovation.siirretty Doriast