Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2

It is also interesting to highlight an initiative led by engineering schools and their associated research laboratories: the creation in 1993 of the CONFERE ( Collège d’études et de recherches en design et conception de produits – Association for Study and Research of Product Design) symposium, specific to this community of researchers in product innovation and design. The objective is to participate in the academic recognition of design, product design and innovation as a priority research subject. CONFERE is thus positioned as a symposium in innovation sciences in which researchers from the previously mentioned teams participate 4. The community also created its own journal in 1998 in order to disseminate its work on a wider scale: IJODIR, the International Journal of Design and Innovation Research , (formerly Design Recherche , created in 1990). This journal aims to provide a scientific reflection on the act of designing and developing innovative products adapted to the world we live in, assuming a position in the field of engineering design .

In our opinion, the 2000s marked a turning point in innovation research. While the historical disciplines that nurtured innovation continue their work, we are also seeing the emergence of research to develop a new vision of the innovation process (Hatchuel et al . 2001; Tomala et al . 2001), which is becoming collaborative (Boujut 2001; Boujut and Blanco 2003), and to confirm the link between the technological system and innovation (Aït-El-Hadj 2002). It is also a period when the first signs of a blurring of disciplinary boundaries in favor of multidisciplinary work can be detected. For example, we will mention those under the impetus of B. Taravel (Richir et al . 2001), founder in 1999 of Laval Virtual, a show on innovation and new technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality, which remain a reference to this day. This awareness in engineering sciences, that innovation is a matter of integration and negotiation between different points of view, has raised the importance of creating synergies between social, technological and process to contribute effectively to customer satisfaction.

This is in part why the work carried out by Hatchuel et al . (2001) has had such an impact on the innovation community. The latter suggests that, in order to innovate continuously, the R&D process must have an intermediate phase called the Research–Innovation–Development process, thus allowing innovation to take place in less restricted and less structured situations.

Therefore, since the 2000s, several laboratories based in engineering or science schools for engineers have carried out research to better understand the upstream phases of the innovation process (front end) and in particular the processes of idea generation and selection before moving on to design. As a result, under the heading of inventive design, theories and methods have been investigated on a massive scale, such as C-K (concept-knowledge) (Hatchuel 2001), TRIZ (Cordova-Lopez et al . 2002) and value creation (Yannou et al . 2002). In addition, innovation is becoming collaborative and open, popularizing research around open innovation. In the same way, taking needs and uses into account becomes a key element in improving the ideation phase and the steering of innovation in general (Boly 2004). Finally, these years saw the emergence of a whole stream of research into the metrology of innovation (Morel and Boly 2004).

Although this list is not exhaustive, it does show that a great deal of research has made it possible to consolidate a community around innovation that remains very active in French engineering schools, and contributes to a field of research that can be described as “innovation engineering” and whose key concepts will be presented in the following section.

Innovation processes have radically changed and must take into account the increasing capacity of industrial developments and the growing complexity of surrounding systems. The question of innovation has therefore emerged over time as a fundamental element that can reconcile two requirements: short-term efficiency in the control of an industrial process and long-term development that will reside in the capacity to create value (both in a human and a productive dimension). These changes in the understanding of the concept of innovation in general have naturally contributed to a new field of research: innovation engineering, whose role is to study the mutual involvement of the disciplines that feed into each other and to obtain knowledge that will become levers of growth for tomorrow’s economy.

Following the exercise of inventorying methods and tools in innovation engineering carried out in 2011 by a collective of researchers and practitioners in engineering techniques under the direction of B. Yannou (2011), we have chosen to take this work for granted and to focus on the accepted bases in the piloting of innovative projects. Moreover, starting from the observation that there is a more than sufficient number of definitions of innovation, we will base ourselves on the definition of innovation of the Oslo Manual, version 2018, taken up in the very recent ISO/TC279 standard on innovation management:

An innovation is a new or improved product or process (or combination thereof) that differs significantly from the organization’s previous products or processes 5and that has been made available to potential users (product) or put into use by the organization (process).

Innovation is a building process. It begins with an intention to create something new because of dissatisfaction, awareness of potential improvements or by surprise/serendipity (i.e. by the involuntary observation of a phenomenon). This is particularly due to the inherent curiosity of every human being and his or her ability to deploy resources to improve living conditions. As De Brabandere (De Brabandere 2014) points out, being creative means taking a different look at an object or a situation, whereas being innovative means achieving the solution.

It is therefore essential to develop one’s ability to explore the ecosystem in which one develops, in particular by being able to understand and integrate the major challenges we face in a mode of exploration commonly known as “from glocal to local”.

As a result, the current trend of frugal innovation cannot be ignored today when it comes to designing an innovation that is accessible to a larger number of people and nor can we ignore the needs expressed or not expressed by users. The analysis of needs and requirements is one of the major tools in innovation engineering. This ability to better understand and identify the context of the innovation is a prerequisite to any innovation engineering process in order to contextualize the project to be developed.

At this stage, it is not a matter of selecting ideas. In fact, it is a mistake to do so because many experiences show that ideas perceived as very attractive at the end of a creativity session turn out to be, in the end, little or not at all accepted by users/consumers. This leads to the interest of integrating the potential users of the innovation upstream of the innovation process, which we will come back to later (second bias).

Engineering research in the field of ideation is now looking for ways to make the process more efficient. To do so, methods are more and more systematic and supported by computer-based tools that make them more robust, such as the association of the TRIZ method with AI, or the development of expert systems associated with ontologies to drive the entire creative process.