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The electronic games industry has grown within the space of a decade to a $40bn global industry. Yet, at least in the UK, the management of innovation in the software development sector reflects the industry's bedroom origins. Visits to major buyers in the US by UK games developers show that publishers increasingly require more sophisticated management procedures from developers, including that with respect to the management of innovation. This paper reports on the development of industry-specific indicators to be used in processes of innovation management, benchmarking innovation practices and performance within the framework of value chain analysis. This provides the sector with a framework for more routinised innovation practices, and is also of relevance to the management of innovation in other software-intensive sectors.

This paper will present the development of an audit tool called the Innovation Compass. It will show how the tool was formulated through a research project, which was aiming to understand the innovation process within organisations. The creation of the Innovation Compass was driven by the research process and, as this paper will give an example of, validated through its application to case studies. The paper gives a greater understanding of the elements of the tool and, how it could be used and developed in other research projects considering innovation and New Product Development.

There are few publications that provide benchmarking of suitable forms and mechanisms for the co-ordination of international R&D and innovation processes in multi-national corporations. This paper aims to help close this gap on the basis of interviews conducted in 18 Western European and Japanese enterprises. In this respect, the analysis of the differences between European and Japanese corporations is highly important because the co-ordination in Japanese firms is often regarded as a model of "best practice". The empirical results reveal that the major strengths of Japanese companies are their effective co-ordination of the value chain and integration of R&D into their business strategies. Both advantages are achieved through intensive use of personal contacts, informal communication and socialisation. However, European enterprises obviously underestimate these instruments and rely more on internal quasi-markets in R&D. These advantages in Japanese R&D management are also accompanied by drawbacks: while co-ordination is successfully supported within the company in Japan, the integration of international R&D is rendered more difficult.

Organisational creativity remains an ill-defined concept. Studies have failed to arrive at a convincing general theory of creativity and, more recently, attention has turned to the possibilities of middle-range theories in which creativity is treated as a context-specific phenomenon. A new approach for exploring the nature of creativity of organisations is reported with preliminary empirical results. The method draws on signalling theory applied to a database of companies generated from citations and executive nominations. Companies such as 3M, IBM, Sony, Disney and Proctor & Gamble were found to yield strong and frequent signals over extended time periods. Strong signals have also been detected from younger firms such as Microsoft, Virgin and Nike. The approach offers the possibility of industry-specific benchmarking for corporate creativity, and for testing the relationship between an organisation's creativity, innovativeness and other change-related features.