Innovation Evaluation: Past and Current Models and a Framework for Infrastructure Projects

Innovation is at the heart of today's competitive economy. The infrastructure industry of a nation plays a crucial role in its economic development and having understood innovation, and its impacts are very important in the current turbulent economic environment. Innovation and infrastructure are both referred to as two main factors to getting competitive internationally; therefore, having innovation evaluated has become one of the priorities for most governments and organizations. Innovation is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon and is very difficult to measure. The aim of this paper is to develop a framework to evaluate innovation and its benefits in infrastructure projects. For this purpose, a systematic review approach was adopted to review past and current models and frameworks in the literature related to the field of innovation and measurement. As the literature is very fragmented and lacks consensus on innovation measurement, it was intended to develop a comprehensive framework with a holistic attitude in mind in order to consider as many as possible interacting elements of the innovation process. The results showed that having a clear understanding of innovation requires evaluating not only inputs and intermediate outputs of the process, but also necessitates evaluation of what happens in the process of innovation, as well as longer term benefits. The proposed framework is developed in the context of infrastructure projects, and it consolidated necessary measuring aspects of innovation, especially the risk of impacts in the process. This area of research is new and relatively unstudied in the context of infrastructure. However, this study begins to scratch the surface of a large area of research that can act as the first step toward more reliable evaluation of innovation in infrastructure projects.