Stakeholders participation in the Innovation Process

Abstract

This master thesis aims to study the stages in which startups include relevant stakeholders in their innovation process. The study seeks to contribute and enrich the innovation management literature regarding stakeholder inclusion. It combines existing literature with the RRI field and adds non-economic stakeholders into the mix, with the aim to enhance the innovation management capabilities of Norwegian startups by conducting a research on the members of an organization in the Oslo region.

The findings suggest that innovation is widely accepted and encouraged, it also shows that firms have dynamic capabilities since they are able to reflect, absorb and adapt to some degree their innovation based on stakeholder inclusion but that these interactions focus on primary economic relationships with informal meetings and networking as the main method. The evidence also shows that most stakeholder interactions are being held at the launch and post launch stages of a new product or service development. The study concludes making an argument for the inclusion of non-economic stakeholders to be done at earlier stages of the innovation process