Simon Richir

Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation

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as retail or insurance have seen the emergence of artificial intelligence for several years, and feel that this is likely to disrupt their business, constituting both a risk and an opportunity. In this case, they will look for external resources to innovate in this direction, because internal R&D is not specialized in this type of technology and will not be able to identify the opportunities. It can also concern the need to solve a technological or scientific problem for which the company does not have the internal expertise. In this case, open innovation is a way for the company to find external resources. This can take the form, for example, of numerous innovation competitions aimed at start-ups or hackathons in which groups of students must propose solutions to a problem encountered by the company.

      In some cases, outside-in open innovation is not about generating ideas from expertise, but rather about having ideas selected by the community. For example, a company looking to quickly renew its product line can gather the community’s opinion to prioritize the products to be developed while being sure that they will meet consumer expectations.

      1.3.2. The example of the MayAM challenge

      For many years, our laboratory has organized the MayAM (for “Mayenne-Arts et Métiers”) open innovation challenge with groups of students from the Institut des Arts et Métiers de Laval specialized in immersive technologies. Each group of students is assigned an industrial company wishing to seize opportunities related to virtual and augmented reality technologies. They must then work for a week to imagine an innovative project for the company. The participating companies are part of an outside-in open innovation approach in the sense that they do not have the internal expertise to identify the risks and opportunities related to these technologies. Therefore, through MayAM, they must find an external resource that will do this work for them. The next logical step in this process is to integrate an expert resource, often through an intern, or a support service provided by the laboratory or a company.

      1.3.3. Collaborative innovation

      The organization of companies in silos often leads to a very low circulation of ideas. Also, beyond the exploitation of external resources, many companies under-exploit internal expertise. This is a form of open innovation, but rather thought at the level of a department, which we call collaborative innovation and which consists of making the circulation of ideas throughout the company more fluid by mobilizing the expertise of other departments.

      1.3.4. Crowdsourcing

      Crowdsourcing is one of the classic tools of outside-in open innovation. The significant development of crowdsourcing in recent years is due to the rise of social networks that make it possible to create and manage communities around specific topics (Whitla 2009). The crowdsourcing process has been described by Trompette et al. (2008) as follows: the organization identifies an activity that it does not want to perform internally. Rather than outsource it in the traditional way, that is, have it performed by a service provider, the company chooses to crowdsource. In this case, it posts the specifications on the Internet (on a platform or on its own Website) and sets the terms of participation (schedule, remuneration, etc.). This allows a large number of individuals to work on the activity. The company then validates the contribution of each person, according to the specifications established in advance, and allocates the expected rewards.

      1.3.5. The lead user

      The lead user concept was developed by Von Hippel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management. To understand who the lead users are, we need to go back to the mechanics of innovation diffusion described by Everett Roger. According to this approach, we consider that when a product is launched, we will first have a few users called “innovators” who are few in number, but interested enough in innovations that they are very easy to convince to buy an innovative product. Then come the “early adopters”, who are a little more numerous and a little more resistant, although they are very interested in innovation, and so on, with the early majority, the late majority and finally the late adopters, who are only likely to be interested in an innovation when it is very widely diffused and established in society. In Von Hippel’s conception, the lead users are the few individuals who are even further upstream than the innovators described by Everett Roger, that is even before the commercial release of the product.

      Lead users have two important characteristics:

       – they are ahead of the major trends in the evolution of uses and they recognize the needs before the others;

       – they have an advantage and skills that lead them to innovate by themselves by developing the solution to their need.

      Thus, lead users use prototypes to satisfy their needs before a commercial product can do so. In this sense, they are considered sources of innovation.

      In theory, one might think that it is very easy to create radical innovations and always be one step ahead of the market by integrating lead users into the innovation process. In practice, we only know for sure that someone was ahead of the curve later on. Survivor syndrome, which is very common in the world of innovation, comes into play, giving us the opportunity to see the success of genius visionaries who “feel” the future and the evolutions to come. After the fact, it is safe to say that the founder of Oculus is a lead user and that the purchase of his company by Facebook to integrate it into its strategy is an illustrative success. It is a success, but let us not forget that it is because it was a success that this case is famous. In any case, lead users are often opinion leaders in their field because of their very strong expertise.

      To identify lead users in a given field of activity, Von Hippel described a method called “pyramid”. It involves asking experts who they think are the best experts in the field, then going to them and asking the same question, and so on until you have a workable list of five or six names of people to interview who will be at the top. You have potentially got your hands on some lead users in your field! The next step is to analyze the usage of these few specialists and identify the types of technologies they use to meet the needs you want to address. If their usage leads you to other areas of expertise, you can then repeat the process of identifying lead users in these other areas of expertise.

      The innovation process not only is based on methods but also relies on tools that can vary according to the type of project, its progress or the habits of the company.

      Technology is the natural partner of the designer, especially when it comes to representing previously identified concepts. Indeed, most of the time, the digital representation tools are not mobilized during the ideation. The generation of ideas is classically carried out in textual form on Post-it notes or a paperboard, in the form of sketches, or by creating physical models with materials that are malleable or can be assembled such as modeling clay, cardboard or Lego (Dorta 2004). Computer-based 3D tools are usually reserved for later stages. In the design process, they are actually used to represent ideas that have already been selected and developed.

      1.4.1. The sketch as a reflective process

      After the very first phases of divergent ideation, the designer will use two types of “conversation”: a conversation with self and a conversation with co-designers and clients. Both types of conversation will require both visual representations and fluidity in the execution of the representation of the designer’s ideas.

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