Innovation management methods in the automotive industry

Abstract

The automotive industry is mainly characterized by shorter product life cycles, ever-growing competitive pressure, significant technological advances and massive changes in the political, technological and sociocultural environment. Therefore, innovation management as an enabler for product, process and business model innovations is becoming more and more important in the automotive industry, a statement which is confirmed by massive increase in innovation expenditure. This paper discusses specific innovation methods related to three cooperation fields: supplier, customer and in-house. The research project, presented in this paper, ascertains their particular implementation level in the automotive industry. One of the findings is the growing significance of the in-house innovation method Big Data as a result of enormous data volume increase. Consequently, the Automotive Big Data Platform (ABDP) Reference Architecture is presented in this paper. Big Data will enable the automotive industry to cope with the challenges.