Vol 4 - L’innovation agile

Technology and Innovation

List of Articles

A group of scientists have decided to take a multidisciplinary look at agile innovation. This concept,
sometimes perceived as fashionable, has never before been the subject of such an extensive and diversified debate in the scientific community. Initial observations show that agile innovation reflects the questioning of companies/organizations both small and large, public and private, individual and grouped, due to the changes they need to implement in order to respond to current societal, economic and environmental challenges. It therefore makes sense to collectively work on and question agile innovation and its impact on processes and innovative dynamics. The six articles presented combine several research fields: innovation engineering, management sciences and
economics. Each explores a different aspect or a specific path to help us understand this complex concept. Together, these articles create a subtle mosaic of original and complementary insights to sketch a panorama of theoretical and practical knowledge in agile innovation and agility.

Although there are many methodologies dedicated to the analysis of creativity and innovation processes, it seemed to us that the innovation-intelligence relationship has been poorly dealth with, at least at the design process level. This is why we have developed a method dedicated to it. We situate it at the crossroads of three perspectives: innovation, knowledge management and strategic intelligence. This method begins by breaking down the process of designing novelties into analysis frameworks identified first by the groups of individuals who implement them. It allows an exploration of particular cases of innovation as well as creativity, taking as a basis the OODA (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) loop to estimate the agility of these processes, that is to say their ability to change maneuver in a relatively short time.

Open Innovation is a widely explored field of research and many technologies have been developed to support the involvement of users, or other external stakeholders of a company, in its distributed co-creation process, i.e. when actors work asynchronously and at geographical distance. One of the fundamental parameters to the success of distributed collaborative approaches is the trust that the actors have in each other, in the current process and in technology. However, the notion of trust is still rarely used as a parameter for piloting and supporting co-creation project deployment. The lack of understanding of the mechanisms involved seems to explain this situation. Using the analysis of two case studies of co-creation in the field of energy, this paper proposes to identify the levers, notably technological ones, favoring the confidence between stakeholders and by extension the agility of the process. In addition to illuminating these practices, this paper provides a first co-creation project management framework for practitioners, through the design of the "co-con" model.

During the launch of new products, innovative companies must be ready for a reorganization of the supply chain that supports the manufacturing of the product in question. Thus, they have to redefine their role at the heart of manufacturing in order to remain competitive. Therefore, reflection must take place as soon as the new product is designed in order to anticipate the organizational, technological and strategic changes. An “agile” supply chain facilitates the integration of a new product by limiting the risks induced by these different changes. In this article, we will show that
anticipating the design of the supply chain as early as possible in the process of development of the new product allows us to implement the most effective strategies to make it agile, and therefore more able to withstand the risks and uncertainties arising from innovation. To illustrate our points, the emblematic case of the Swatch is studied.

The venture capitalist is the main funder of the innovative firm. The relationship between these two actors is favored by territorial innovation systems. The venture capitalist plays an important role both as a provider of funds and as an advisor of the entrepreneur. This article proposes a new definition of the entrepreneur venture capitalist relationship, the “entrepreneur venture capitalist duo”, which brings a complementary vision to the agency theory, usually used to describe this relationship. The article also looks at the role of agility in the functioning of this duo, and shows the
importance of its contribution to the territorial knowledge capital through the accumulation of knowledge and skills of the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist.

Innovation has an inherently dynamic character that is changing the way it is managed within companies. All of these changes have impacts on innovation practices and processes, making it difficult to define a relevant indicator of the innovation capability over time. Thus, indicators of capacity to innovate are forced to evolve constantly. In this article, a method of iterative updating of innovation capability indicators is proposed. Based on the Deming cycle of continuous improvement, the methodology proposes four steps: follow, choose, integrate and test. These steps are configured as a loop to repeat this sequence according to the speed of changes in the innovation environment. The methodology will be tested on the indicator of innovation capacity proposed by the ERPI research team of the University of Lorraine, called the Potential Innovation Index (PII). This case study highlights the evolution of PII since its last version in 2016 to its current
version.

When we talk about an agile enterprise we think of a company that has the ability to quickly adapt to market changes. But agility can also mean flexibility, and in human resource management flexibility can be brutal. For these reasons one should be wary of the buzzwords that can manipulate opinions and thinking. In our opinion, agility does not revolutionize design. What would a non-agile innovation look like? Would it be slow, clumsy or fixed or? Agility refers here to the fundamental notions of innovative design, it is based on a technological, economic, social and legal watch, a sufficiently shared communication, a mobilization of the people around representations and shared stakes in an
organization capable of quickly reconfiguring itself. It is in these areas that we must look for agile skills.