Digitalising and visualising innovation process: comparative analysis of digital tools supporting innovation process in SMEs

The growing importance of innovation for SMEs competitive advantage means, that increasing the effectiveness of innovation process can be a deciding factor for their success in the market or even survival. Digitalization strongly influenced numerous fields and it also starts to change the innovation management. The main aim of newly appearing digital platforms is to structure innovation process, thus making it more predictable and quantifiable. Because of that, the question arises to what extent can these tools support the innovation process in small and medium enterprises. This paper aims to explore the level to which such digital tools reflect the complexity and fuzzy nature of innovation process in the context of SMEs. All the tools selected were screened against defined stages of innovation process, thus determining the complexity of innovation management support. Then the support for the fuzzy nature of innovation process was determined by recognizing tools flexibility and support for outputs unpredictability and processes repeatability. The conclusions provide insights into usability of existing innovation digital tools for SMEs and their supporting potential for small business innovation processes. Though, it is concluded that while several limitations of innovating digitally still exist, innovation management digitalization has the potential to affect modifications in innovation behaviors in the nearest future.