Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1

Taking this democratization of innovation one step further, every employee is now a potential innovator: they are encouraged to propose ideas and formalize them in a system that allows them to be selected and developed with the support of the company. Thus, companies have set up innovation systems that allow all employees to participate in the innovation effort. A variety of systems to support the genesis of novelty under various names have therefore emerged: organizational creativity, participative innovation, etc. These approaches make it possible to increase the level of knowledge (Cohen and Levinthal 1990). Through new combinations, this improves the absorption capacity of the company, by seeking new ideas and knowledge in close connection with established knowledge. These approaches are useful because they increase the internal knowledge base and allow it to be renewed by adding new knowledge, circulated by internal, rather than external actors (Laviolette et al . 2016). They are also interesting because they allow the actors of the firm to free themselves from the organizational routines of innovation creation, particularly in the delimited spaces of R&D, where innovation is legitimate, to experiment and test in the margins of the organization, other forms of innovation, making it possible to multiply the dynamic capacity of the firm 10-fold. These devices promote and support already existing forms of innovation operating in interstices, which have sometimes been difficult to recognize or have even been rejected by the dominant currents in the firm. The emblematic examples of the post-it or Nespresso , or even microcomputing explain that innovation, especially radical innovation, often takes place in the margins because it breaks away from the dominant models (Christensen et al . 2015).

The identification of these emerging ideas and the recognition of their bearers are the first steps for their development within the organization. However, the company should not stop there. Once the “good ideas” have been selected, the support and development of these ideas involves obtaining resources and, above all, putting them in contact with other knowledgeable players, in order to turn the idea into an opportunity for the company internally or externally. It is at this level that incubation facilities can play a crucial role as dedicated spaces for transforming ideas into opportunities, whether they be products for a new market or processes to improve the organization itself. We find here, the importance of this phase, or centrifugal movement, to protect the development of the innovation idea through selected resources and links. However, even though the development of new knowledge is often protected, innovation spaces do not operate in a vacuum. They are connected to knowledge and information networks on technologies, markets and society as a whole. At the scale of a city, Simon (2009) demonstrates the importance of innovation communities operating in different social groups with different roles and activities. For a company located in this city that wants to benefit from this new knowledge, it is important to establish varied relationships with the actors in the different areas of innovation where the standards are not the same.

Thus. if intra-organizational links are important for the company, it is crucial to develop inter-organizational links to support and develop innovation. This stratification of the space of relationships can be done according to the classical logic of upstream and downstream, if we refer to the value chain (Porter 1990). A firm can then characterize the first circle of partners upstream of the innovation, be they design firms, component and material suppliers, research laboratories, etc. (Porter 1990). There are specific partners that contribute to the design activity of the innovation. These actors sometimes become assimilated to internal actors because the collaborations are so strong and recurrent. A second circle of partners upstream of the innovation is more related to the activities of diffusion, or even the marketing of the innovation. This stage involves players such as innovation intermediaries in charge of commercialization; they are accelerants or service providers for the commercialization of the innovation, leading users or other groups of community players more sensitive to certain uses, and potentially promoters of the innovation. However, this distinction between exploration and exploitation actors is not enough. Innovation is deployed through the permanent circulation of these different actors, who are fairly hybrid between several networks, which are referred to as innovation intermediaries (Howells 2006). Their intermediation activities consist of finding new partners, organizing transactions between two or more parties, mediating collaborations and advising on finding financing. Their hybrid identity seems to be a key aspect in enabling these actors to promote the circulation of knowledge and resources between innovation spaces with often-conflicting labor standards (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991).

Ultimately, innovation management according to space is particularly fruitful if we consider space as an organized arrangement of expertise, relationships and interests deliberately constructed to foster the emergence of ideas, or even support their development and diffusion to other geographical and political scales (Westley et al . 2014; Grenier and Denis 2017). In fact, innovation management implies a spatial strategy aimed at (1) designing and shaping spaces according to two joint movements of delimitation and enlargement and (2) configuring them by developing links inside and outside of these spaces, with particular care for intersections where key actors such as intermediaries operate. More than a geographical or physical delimitation, it is its relational nature that stands out, but it also has a material and temporal dimension. The innovation space can be defined as spatiotemporal events where actors gather at a given point to make sense and give meaning, with an aspiration to develop new ideas and practices (Massey 2005; Sergot and Saives 2016). Thus, there is a circumstantial aspect of innovation that can be theorized, certainly with space, and also with time and matter.

An innovation process can easily be represented as a sequence of steps, each with its own duration and rhythm. Innovation management seeks to reduce this time, while reducing costs and improving the chances of success. We talk about time-to-market or innovation races. As a result, management practices for R&D teams and project management have been developed to accelerate the production of innovation, such as open innovation, concurrent engineering or Scrum practices (Burger-Helmchen and Raedersdorf 2018). It is also the time of the decision that forces the standardization of points of view in companies.

There are many representations of the innovation process in literature. One of the simplest visually, and yet one of the richest in terms of interactions and representation of time, is that proposed by Cohendet and Simon (2015). Their work has been widely used in literature on creativity and innovation (Bathelt et al . 2017). It is a holistic model that brings creativity, knowledge and innovation into interaction and can easily be described in four main steps encompassing the views and discourses of all managers. Figure 26.1 is a reproduction of this model.

The process from idea to product is long, complex and highly strategic (Birkinshaw et al . 2012). Once ideas are generated, companies must convert them, which takes time, financial resources and skills. During the process, different points of view, storytelling techniques and worldviews collide. The classic representation of the innovation process is mostly in the form of a stage-gate (Pahl et al . 2006), which is shown in the lower part of Figure 26.1.