Firm decision-making process about innovation

In a dynamic world, full of opportunity, the development of tools able to support companies in the decision-making process plays a crucial role. In this paper, a new decision support system is presented. The tool developed is an agent-based simulator, which helps managers and decision maker in formulating choices to improve firms' performance in terms of innovation. Both economic and innovation performance are considered. The economic performance is evaluated using firms' profit, whereas the innovation performance is evaluated using the Innovation Patent Index (IPI) based on patent data. In particular, the paper shows how the newly developed tool can be used by managers to investigate the impact of open and closed innovation on the economic and innovation performance of firms through the "what-if" analysis. The results show that the tool is a very timely, useful and friendly instrument to investigate open and closed innovation used to improve the economic and innovation performance of firms.