**3.1 Design**

The design of the survey was accomplished in two parts: a qualitative interview process to determine key issues, and an iterative piloting stage to refine the questionnaire. The qualitative interview process occurred in Fall 2017. We interviewed over 30 C-Level innovation managers working at international large firms (\$500 m + in revenue). These managers were sourced from our personal and professional networks. With them, we have conducted open-ended interviews to capture qualitative insights that helped us draft the large-scale questionnaire for our final survey. We then tested those questions through live questionnaire-taking, where innovation leaders at companies agreed to complete the survey while on the phone with us (though none of these preliminary surveys are included in our results, since their sampling was not representative). Respondents narrated their interpretations of the survey questions as they progressed, and we questioned them on what they meant by their answers. Based on our observations of their surveytaking experience, as well as their direct feedback, we iterated the questions until we were confident that respondents understood what was being asked and felt the answers conveyed their companies' experiences.

To finalize the questionnaire, we followed an iterative process of rewriting and retesting. We also drew on previous innovation survey work [20] as well as guidelines from the Oslo manual [1].

The final survey was administered using random sampling (see Survey Administration and Sampling, below) to ensure statistical representativeness. It was answered by 300 innovation managers (see Survey Administration and Sampling section below) and took respondents 25–35 minutes to complete. The questionnaire included 35 often multi-part questions (for a total of 101 questions). The main topics covered included company-level questions on the following topics:


Consistent with the Oslo manual [1] recommendation, we also asked questions about "a single, focal, most important innovation, facilitating information retrieval about enablers, features, and outcomes of business innovations", in our case the most successful innovation project that their company had completed in the last two years.
