WHICH IS THE ROLE OF INNOVATION IN CURRENT SOCIETY? EVIDENCE FROM THE SPANISH PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY

At current knowledge society, innovation is considered essential in order to achieve survival and growth in organizations. Therefore, the engineering managers need tools facilitating the best innovation strategies for their organizations. In this sense, we present an original study about how Spanish companies. In the Pharmaceutical Industry handle innovation and we present the most relative factors in this process. Then, we realize a cluster analysis by which we identify eight behaviors according to how enterprises manage their innovation process. As a result, this research provides action guidelines to engineering managers in order to promote success in their innovation process within the Spanish Pharmaceutical Industry. In general, this industry is composed by organizations which find total quality, management excellence and knowledge management; therefore, this paper could support innovative strategies in any other industry.