written by Joëlle FOREST.
2
Engineering – Innovation Engineering: A Holistic and Operational Approach to the Innovation Process
2.1. Introduction
The strategic and competitive environment in which organizations must operate has been significantly affected in recent years by globalization, technological and digital revolutions as well as the changing needs and expectations of users and consumers/customers. Today, more than ever, it is urgent to make organizations capable of dealing with change in an innovative and truly agile way.
How can more or new value be created? Whether we are talking about products, processes or services, innovation has the mission of bringing something new and original to existing or new markets. Any innovation process is based on the concept of a “real good idea”, one that will add value by going off the beaten track and that will be accepted by the target user/consumer. It happens neither by chance nor due to the sole fact that scientists have such a mission in the R&D department. It can be done by anyone.
It is true that some innovations that have received a lot of attention from the media have arrived by accident, or by chance (e.g. the post-it), although these remain marginal. Today, most innovations are the result of a continuous search for opportunities within the firm’s environment and are the result of a systematic approach and a set of planned activities.
Managing the innovation process therefore requires skills that need to be developed through a specific methodological toolset which will allow us to be aware of global circumstances in order to act locally and which, above all, will make it possible to measure the impacts of decisions made about the ecosystem in which the innovation will/must find its place. In this sense, the objectives of the implemented approach in innovation engineering are: to encourage the emergence of concepts from end-users (bottom-up) by relying on agile-inspired approaches and by using rapid prototyping from the upstream phases (front end) of the innovation process; to develop co-creation and co-design by promoting collaborative and open innovation within a group of extended actors (customers, users, suppliers, partners, etc.); and to have the end-users evaluate the prototypes produced. We therefore assume that it is a process, i.e. a set of interdependent activities that use inputs to produce a result that adds value to the field under study. It is therefore possible to measure the state of each activity and thus to propose ways of improvement. In this sense, innovation engineering cannot be a linear process, but a succession of steps (“gates” in the sense of Cooper (1990)), which can be arranged according to the context of the innovation and reviewed along the way.
In this contribution, we first propose tracing the origins of the structuring of this field of research in France, showing the point of view of engineering that deals with the theme of innovation and the major currents of thought that have enabled innovation engineering to be structured as an approach to support the improvement of innovation processes. We have chosen to focus on France because, as actors in this ecosystem, we think we know it well enough to provide a complete, if not exhaustive, view of this field of research. We will nevertheless draw parallels with international authors who, because of their popularity, have had a perceptible impact on the evolution of research, as well as with research communities that have been created and that were at the origin of the first international conferences on innovation, science and technology management. Then, we will present the key concepts and major biases of the transformation of an idea into a useful innovation for society. We also provide some advice to make the engineering for innovation approach accessible to any researcher, trainer or industrialist who wishes to get out of their routine and acquire new practices to carry out their innovation projects. Beyond a method, this is really a new way of acting (mindset) that allows an organization and its individuals to become more efficient. It is not a matter of reproducing a formula learned by heart, but rather of understanding the main principles in order to develop the process best suited to the context and singularities of each situation.
2.2. Innovation engineering: a field of research that has struggled to structure itself in France
Since when have engineers been interested in innovation as a field of research in its own right? Is it possible to find the historical landmarks that have marked the structuring of this field of research and especially the contributing feeder disciplines?
Many authors agree that the emergence of this field of research has its roots in two streams of research: industrial engineering and industrial systems engineering, disciplines that were born at the beginning of the century in the United States1, 2
The first definition, established in 1955 and revised in 1985 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers, states that “industrial engineering” is concerned with the design, improvement and implementation of integrated systems of human resources, materials, equipment and energy. It uses knowledge and know-how in mathematics, physics and social sciences, as well as the principles and methods of analysis and design relevant to the art of engineering, in order to predict and evaluate the results that can be expected from such systems.
Although the term “design” is used twice in this definition, practice shows that this definition is very production-oriented. As a result, in the United States, we have seen the emergence of “engineering management” from management schools, which focuses more on the technological lifecycle (Cleland et al. 1981).
In France, the concept of industrial engineering (IE) arrived in 1975 to face economic pressures and to solve problems of optimizing the organization of production systems in terms of price, quantity, quality and flexibility. More generally, it deals with the topics of production management, product/process design and project management and thus marks a first step in responding to the problem of optimizing industrial processes (design process, manufacturing, inventory management, quality, planning, marketing, etc.). It is an interdisciplinary application of the models and tools of the feeder disciplines to the problems of industrial organization (e.g. the contributions of statistics to quality control, or those of mathematics to production scheduling).
In the 1980s, increasing globalized competitive pressure led to the search for decisive competitive advantages, in particular by working on the integrated design of products, processes, production tools and marketing strategies to reduce lead times and become increasingly responsive to the environment.
This is how industrial systems engineering (ISE) was born, integrating the dimensions of “production sciences”, “design sciences” and “project management”, thus combining the approaches of industrial engineering and engineering management. More generally, the idea is to consider a more global vision and to work on enlarged study objects (e.g. moving from flow optimization to optimization of the organization of the industrial system or from product design to activity design). This has led to a change in the level of approach to problems both in their spatio-temporal and cultural dimensions. In addition, the obsolescence or decline of entire areas of industrial and service activity (metallurgy, coal mining, traditional trade) associated with the emergence of new technologies, the evolution of consumption and the internationalization of markets has led to the increasingly acute and rapid need for the creation of new activities.
In France, these two schools of thought coexist, and although they originally shared a technological vision of innovation, they separated from it in the mid-1980s, thus marking a differentiating aspect in both disciplines and the first signs of what would later become a common line of research: innovation engineering in an ecosystems perspective. We will come back to this later.
In this chapter, we have attempted the perilous exercise of retracing the evolution, both temporal and conceptual, of the vision of the notion of innovation from the moment that IE and the ISE became interested in it. We have also highlighted the contributions of researchers from engineering schools to the structuring of this field of research. Finally, we have chosen to take into consideration certain works carried out by engineers who have developed a dual competence (economics, management, sociology,