Abstract:
Innovation is key aspect in maintaining the competitive edge of any business or
company. With the fast-growing nature of technology innovation plays a major role in
the context of software industry. Thus, maintaining the competitive edge has become a
huge challenge for companies due to the expanding technology. Similarly, the constant
innovation has become a major necessity for the companies that belongs to the software
domain around the world.
When relating to the importance of innovation to the Sri Lankan context, currently
many startup companies are emerging into the local software industry. Thus,
maintaining the competitive advantage has become vital for the small to medium scale
software companies in Sri Lanka. Even though many large-scale software companies
in Sri Lanka have initiated NPD projects, most of the SME companies are
comparatively behind in initiating NPD projects mainly due to the lack of funding for
NPD projects or due to uncertainties and risks associated. NPD can be conducted in
two approaches such as conducting market research or through idea generation. This
project aims to analyze the problems in current methods of idea selection in NPD
projects in the Sri Lankan software industry and propose an IS solution to introduce an
efficient platform that can obtain and assess employee ideas to help management make
successful business decisions when selecting NPD projects. Several interviews and
surveys have been conducted with industry experts to identify problems faced by
ideators, idea reviewers and management of SME IT companies in Sri Lanka. The
results obtained indicated that the current process if idea selection needs to be structured
and digitized to ensure the accurate tracking and selection of ideas submitted by
employees while reducing the risks and uncertainties associated with idea selection.
Thus, constant feedback was obtained by stakeholders involved to propose a solution
that address the problem identified. The developed solution includes a web-based
system that will accurately manages the idea selection process which have been
evaluated by stakeholders involved to ensure that the solution has addressed the aimed
purpose."
