PETER PRIBILLA-STIFTUNG

– Do rotten tomatoes (or stars) matter to chefs? The aim of this project is to make the role of critics visible in both, the innovation process of firms where leader-creators drive innovation and the process of leading innovation in the industry. Figure 1 illustrates the aim of the project. The dashed line indicates that previous research has not taken the role of critics in the innovation process into consideration. Only the role that critics play on the market by influencing customers and consequently sales, has been researched. As the aim of the project is to identify the role that critics play in the innovation process, we have to deal with critics in detail. Therefore, we differentiate between expert critics and non-expert critics. Expert critics are professional reviewers who have a certain level of expertise. They normally adopted a standardized reviewing process in order to evaluate the quality of a service or a product. In contrast, non-experts is everybody else who evaluates the same service or product and publishes it (e.g. in online communities).