Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2 - Группа авторов - Страница 26

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.