Open Challenges and Research Roadmap: Visual Representations aiding Organizational Leadership in Decision Making for New Product Development at the Early Innovation Stage

Innovation is a cornerstone for an organization’s survival and success in the global competitive landscape in the VUCA world. The New Product Development (NPD) process is a crucial part of the portfolio and Innovation Management (IM) process. The leadership of an organization has a disproportionate impact on the outcome of innovation activities. Their involvement in IM and NPD is critical for success, considering they make strategic decisions to allocate resources for business growth. The leadership team demands a holistic picture of ideas before making decisions at early stages. The leadership challenge in decision making is that they have a limited time to make decisions by understanding many related aspects and insights quickly. The visual approaches have been vital in management practices to understand the situation and aid in decision-making by supporting cognitive processes. The fundamental problem in using visual representation is hidden expectations of leadership teams to represent needed elements to aid in strategic decision-making by leadership at the early stage of innovation. Also, the configuration of elements and interplay is another issue. The core challenge lies in understanding the effectiveness of currently used visual representations and then improving them by identifying needed elements and their configuration and placement in the visual representation. The paper takes literature review, expert interviews, and brainstorming approaches to distill the challenges to the concrete research questions and objectives. Providing solutions to the open research questions and challenges can significantly enhance the quality and speed of innovation-related decision-making.