be they academic, research, or technology or technique transfer partnerships. In addition, research on collaborative platforms has multiplied, offering opportunities to include in the management of an innovative project a multi-player, multi-skilled and low-cost perspective. While this considerably increases the creative dimension, it has also created new problems of intellectual protection when the production of ideas is collective.
Similarly, research to improve the management of innovation processes has been enriched by the latest work on flexible methods. Indeed, the imperatives of permanent and continuous innovation have shown the limits of traditional project management tools and methods. If these are well adapted for product design/improvement, it is not the same when it comes to innovative projects.
2.3.4. Fourth bias: a universal innovation process does not exist!
The ISO 56002 standard on innovation management correctly places the key moments of an innovation project: identifying opportunities, creating concepts, validating concepts, and developing and deploying solutions. It also specifies that although there is not a universal process model that is applicable for all organizations, it is possible to identify five main “phases” that are more or less always present. The ISO 56002:2019 standard represents those “phases”.
It is therefore commonly accepted today that there is no ideal process for developing an innovative activity; however, there are margins of freedom to be taken.
Although at first glance it seems that innovation is a unique and creative process, and apparently without structure, it has been proven that innovation can benefit from a common framework and standardization (ISO 56002).
There is no typical process leading from an idea to an activity anchored in its environment, but rather an agility in adapting and reorganizing itself according to the evolution of the environment. As a result, agile innovation and innovation agility are the foundations of innovation engineering. It is all about learning to free oneself from any typical model by developing the ability to reconfigure steps, to remove or add steps if necessary. Depending on the very nature of the innovation, whether it is incremental, radical or disruptive, engineering must be at the service of the project and not the other way around. It is therefore obvious that if we are looking for incremental innovation, we are not going to immediately start setting up a creativity session. Rather, we will prefer tools such as competitive intelligence or the search for customer dissatisfaction in order to improve the existing product/process or service at a lower cost and in the short term. However, the more we look for radical innovation, the more open innovation approaches will be used to try to pick up weak signals from the markets. Feeling the unspoken needs of users and establishing foresight-related tools are another way to approach this first phase of an innovation process.
2.3.5. Fifth bias: the importance of materializing and evaluating ideas as early as possible by including users in the process
Concept validation has gradually become a central theme in the innovation engineering process. Indeed, it is at this stage of the process that ideas begin to take shape and can therefore be improved and amended by a collective. Very early on, researchers realized the importance of integrating potential users and their uses as early as possible in order to co-design future products/services/organizations with them. Indeed, testing and experimenting with concepts as early as possible will allow participants to better visualize the scope of the innovation, to better embody it. In fact, rapid prototyping has become the technical support for validating the project progress as early as possible because it provides a physical (prototype) or virtual (3D model) representation of an idea with the possibility, at this stage of the process, of integrating user feedback to improve or even rethink the initial idea.
However, although prototyping, because of its iterative nature, is a very interesting way to improve the acceptability of the concept in the upstream phase, it also generates a lot of waste. Indeed, prototyping has been greatly facilitated by the development of low-cost simulation techniques and tools such as 3D scanners and printers. The multiplication of trial-and-error attempts has resulted in a lot of waste from this creative part of the innovation process. We then saw the parallel development of numerous research efforts in order to recycle the materials used during the materialization process for validation by the users of the concepts. This, by integrating the concept of a short circuit (closed loop) in order to consider the entire lifecycle of the product for an innovative and responsible design.
Integrating users upstream of the innovation process is not an easy thing either. We have seen the development of a whole research activity, supported by information and digital technologies around the notion of a living lab or laboratory of uses. These are defined by the European Network of Living Labs, ENOLL, as user-led open innovation ecosystems that engage all stakeholders in the form of a public–private–people partnership (PPPP) to co-create products, services, social innovations and more in a real context, whether physically or virtually. In fact, living labs are part of open-innovation and usage-based innovation research trends, and help to explain the explosion of work on these themes in engineering since the mid-2000s.
2.4. Conclusion
We have shown in this contribution that, while innovation has long been of interest to the engineering sciences, we note that there was a turning point in the 2000s in terms of production and reflections on the use of engineering in the service of innovation.
In an increasingly connected world, where the globalization, acceleration and democratization of technologies are combined, new methods and processes of innovation are needed. The aim is to innovate faster, and to decompartmentalize organizations in order to create more value and reach new markets.
Through the design and development of tools (physical and digital platforms, software, etc.), methods (taking user requirements into account when assessing the need for novelty, prospective and dynamic simulation methods for analyzing the impact of an innovation on its environments, diagnosis of the capacity to innovate, collaborative engineering, decision support, etc.) and partnership modes (open innovation approach, etc.), engineering research has shed significant light on the upstream phase of innovation.
We have thus moved from a strategy of designing products/processes/services “for” to a strategy of designing “for, with and by” users, thereby restoring the credibility of a previously forgotten approach, design thinking. Taking into account the user experience through actual practices of product use, and assessing their needs and desires become the central concepts of current investigations.
Indeed, new methodologies, metrics and tools to assess the sustainable value of solutions by jointly evaluating their social, environmental and economic impacts need to be considered. The same is true for new demonstrators and experimental protocols enabling research to be conducted in living lab mode (i.e. involving public–private–people partnerships).
Innovation management must adapt: project management methods and tools are becoming “lean” and flexible, and are adopting evaluation techniques that integrate an increased variety and variability of data in the development of prospective scenarios for an innovation.
As you will have understood, innovation as seen through engineering sciences still has many fields to investigate in order to provide our industries and communities with methods and tools for sustainable innovation, i.e. to create value for the benefit of all stakeholders. This is where innovation engineering and innovation management stand out:
1 1) “Innovation management is the implementation of management techniques and systems designed to create the most favorable conditions for the development of concrete innovations”6. It is a managerial process.
2 2) Innovation engineering enables the design and implementation of tools orchestrated by an ecosystem-based architecture for understanding and operationalizing the innovation process.
2.5. Acknowledgments
The