Measuring Employees’ Communication for Innovation: The Employee Innovation Potential Scale

Abstract. This research aimed to introduce and validate a new self-report measure of organizational communication related to early stages of employee-driven innovation – the Employee Innovation Potential Scale (EIPS). Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed consecutively on two samples of employees from Serbian companies ( N = 723). The final form of the EIPS comprises 25 items and measures four factors: insight into company problems and their causes, company values employees' ideas, idea communication, and interest in company improvements. Employees who shared more ideas had higher scores on all four factors compared to employees who did not share any ideas or just a few, which confirmed factors’ criterion validity. Moreover, employees who shared more global and radical ideas had higher scores on the first two factors. The results supported the four-factor solution of EIPS and its criterion validity.

Communicating Function and Co-Creating Healthy Food: Designing a Functional Food Product Together with Consumers

Functional food is lately an interesting topic from the new product development perspective; complex motivation and expectations of consumers regarding it present a challenge when new products are designed. Co-creation is an interesting alternative to the standard practices by the R & D departments since it directly involves consumers in the various stages of the creation process. This work aims to describe experiences of engaging consumers in different development stages of a functional food product within a project realized at a food research institute. Four consecutive studies were conducted: the first study explored current trends in Serbia regarding the way consumers use functional food and are informed about it; the second study described development of a raspberry seeds extract with antioxidant and anti-proliferative activity confirmed in vitro; the third study tested the same extract in a sample of consumers, validating its usability in food products; and the fourth study described a co-creation session with 18 participants, during which a number of activities were realized to stimulate idea generation. Rather than the final product idea itself, this work is valuable because of detailed insights into the various phases of the co-creation process. It is shown that consumers and food researchers can together engage in the new food product development process as long as the communication between them is rich and with mutual understanding.