Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2 - Группа авторов - Страница 27

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.