IT FEELS RIGHT! Intuitive decision making in innovation management: A systematic review, and empirical evidence at the commercialisation stage of innovation

Abstract

My research aims to explore the role of intuitive decision making when commercialising new products. My motivation is to understand how intuitive decision making happens at the commercialisation stage of innovation. Specifically, I aim to identify what heuristics drive intuitive decision making at this stage, and how. I do this to provide evidence for one of the most prominent decision-making heuristics (i.e., the representativeness heuristic), and how it precedes intuitive decisions in the categorisation of expected new product success in the market, which is key when commercialising innovation. I focus on this stage of innovation management because this is where most innovations fail. I conduct two experimental studies to investigate whether positive and negative (valence of representative information) and less or more information (amount of representative information) affects probabilistic decision making intuitively or rationally, and whether expertise (argued to enable better intuitive decisions) moderates this relationship. In the first stage of this experimental study I conduct a pilot study with N=27 participants to ascertain a cause–effect relationship between valence and amount of information, and intuitive decisions. In the second stage, I increase the sample to N=112 participants divided into three experimental groups (i.e., innovation managers, other managers, and students) to understand whether innovation expertise is a moderating factor for making intuitive decisions. Additionally, I conduct a concept analysis of answers provided by all experimental participants to an open-ended question to ascertain how they self-declared the role of intuition in making innovation decisions. I also use a dispositional decision-making questionnaire to ascertain whether each participant sees themself as more intuitive or rational when making decisions. I found that most participants believe that intuition has a role to play when making decisions in innovation. Further, the experimental results reveal that valence and amount of information drive intuitive decisions about the categorisation of new product success, and that expertise moderates this relationship. Overall, these findings provide scholars with new empirical evidence about the antecedents/heuristics behind intuitive decision making. For practitioners, it provides an understanding of some of the "rules of thumb" utilised when commercialising an innovation project, and whether these rules result in biased decision making that leads to erroneous decisions.