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9819 results in Engineering: general interest

Page 152 of 491

  • 10 - The methodologies of innovative design: C-K theory, innovation fields and design spaces

  • from PART IV - Innovative design: tools and organizations
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 225-255

  • Summary

    Organizing the I function

    As in previous chapters, we begin with a few practical comments and questions from the Innovation Manager. ‘I agree with the idea that innovative design is a specific activity, different from activities in the engineering and design or research departments. This distinction clarifies the role of D and R and their interdependency with I. All too often, confusion between I and R&D has meant that I-type projects have been undertaken without having the right resources, with the result that they have been judged as bad research or bad development projects. I also agree that “innovation fields”, which enable projects to be launched without necessarily thinking about the final product, favour exploratory approaches, both in terms of value and competencies, and help evaluate the work on the basis of new criteria.

    ‘But R and D already have sophisticated management tools to organize and steer them, and we need to find similar management methods for innovative design. This raises a number of questions regarding evaluation criteria and organization, particularly with respect to interactions with R&D and with the other designers. Also, how can innovation fields be structured and how can any excess knowledge be reused? Do we already have any methods, tools, good practices or models?’

    Models of activity and organization of the I function in large firms

    In recent years there has been a massive increase in the number of ‘innovation departments’, in the form of business development units, innovation-oriented centres, departments for research, innovation and preliminary projects, etc.

  • 4 - Highly innovative firms – Tefal 1974–1997: the wizards of Rumilly

  • from PART II - Design capacities in innovative firms
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 69-96

  • Summary

    Innovation from the inside

    In Chapter 1 we mentioned a number of real cases of players directly involved in innovation. In this chapter, we introduce an imaginary Innovation Manager who has just been appointed to a large firm and who will serve as a guide for the concrete problems facing managers on an everyday basis. He begins with some very practical questions. ‘In the current system of innovation-intensive capitalism, how can we manage our firm's design capacities when we have uncertain object identities and limited resources? My company has just created the job of Innovation Manager and knows that there is an urgent need to address the issue, but how do I go about it in practice? Where can I find the new techniques we need to manage innovation?’

    To answer these questions, we needed to study innovation ‘from the inside’, but the first problem was to decide where to look and what to describe. There were hosts of examples of workshops with state-of-the-art prototypes, of open-plan offices with the muffled hum of CAD workstations. There were also scores of visionary leaders and distraught managers, not to mention the thousands of anonymous engineers and doctors designing the cars, microprocessors, drugs, food products or services of the future. They could tell us about their successes and failures, the palace intrigues and all that went on behind the scenes, but were their experiences relevant to the problem of managing design capacities? The greatest prudence was required.

  • Bibliographical appendix: Innovation viewed by the different disciplines: an extended survey of the literature

  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 346-400

  • Summary

    Our study of innovation would not be complete without mentioning the economic, marketing, cognitive, organizational and managerial dimensions that come into play. The aim of this appendix is to summarize the extensive literature on each of these aspects. We will look at the five disciplines in turn: economics, sociology, the cognitive sciences, organization and management. For each discipline, we will focus on three characteristics:

  • The genealogy of the research questions. A number of concepts have been proposed in each of the five disciplines, but to understand how they came into being and their impact, they have to be placed in the genealogical context of the different streams of research. For each concept, we will look at the type of question it dealt with and the context that led the different disciplines to address the issue and to produce the different models and theories. By studying when and why the new concepts emerged, we will have a clearer picture of the different questions which researchers were confronted with over the years.

  • The key notions and their links with action. In the past, research was very much affected by the discipline it belonged to. In many cases, innovation as such was not the subject of the research but reflected a tactical stance: the authors used a description of phenomena relating to innovation to challenge their disciplines' established theories. This perspective led to progress in studying the phenomena involved in innovation but, contrary to a management approach, did not focus on the generation of new forms of collective action. This is why the concepts sometimes appear inadequate compared with the challenges involved in managing the economic, marketing, organizational or cognitive aspects of activities designed to encourage innovation.

  • […]

  • Foreword by Paul Rivier

  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp ix-x

  • Summary

    It gives me great pleasure to preface this book on innovation. In 1994, a young student contacted me because he wanted to do a PhD thesis on innovation at Tefal. I agreed, but on the condition that he took an active part in designing new products. Vincent Chapel was more successful than I had ever imagined. He managed some very interesting innovations for Tefal and then went on to create several innovative start-ups, one of which is described here. Also, his PhD, directed by Armand Hatchuel, gave me the opportunity to get to know and appreciate the research presented by the authors of this book.

    As a company director, the necessity for innovation seems quite natural to me. It is not just one priority among others, as all the rest depends on it. First, economic survival, of course, but also the social well-being of the personnel, which, in my view, is the main purpose of firms. In the different companies I have managed over the years, I have always personally committed myself to exploring all the possible paths for new developments. I believe this is part of a manager's responsibilities. If all we have to propose are efforts to increase productivity, we can hardly expect members of staff to be really committed to the firm. It was doubtless this frame of mind which encouraged us to adopt design reasoning and business decisions in favour of innovation.

  • 3 - The design activity and innovation capability

  • from PART I - From innovation to innovative design
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 51-66

  • Summary

    In the preceding chapters, we have shown that innovation must be seen from a different angle, i.e. as the result of an actively sustained, voluntary process that can be organized, rather than as an ex post judgement. Firms wishing to innovate must manage ‘innovation capabilities’, but what exactly does this mean? Which activities are involved, who should lead them and how can their performance be evaluated?

    The aim of this chapter is to show that firms which try to develop their innovation capabilities must place a new emphasis on design activities. These must be carefully organized and managed, especially in the case of innovative design. Although they play a central role in most major industrial firms today, relatively little is documented about these design activities, which leads us to believe that they have not been studied in any great detail.

    There are several reasons for focused exploration and analysis of design activities. If we try to identify the actors who contribute to innovation capabilities, we automatically think of the researchers and engineers in R&D departments, whose mission is indeed to contribute to innovation by designing products and processes. However, unless we want to restrict our study to technological innovation, we should also include industrial designers, a rapidly expanding category which has an increasing influence within firms today. We should also mention specialists in communications and semiotics, such as advertisers, brand designers, etc., and in certain cases user groups should also be included. All these actors have one thing in common: they design things.

  • Foreword by Marc Maurer

  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp xi-xii

  • Summary

    Innovation and competitiveness

    The impact of globalization goes way beyond the issue of relocations of manufacturing plants. It throws firms into a new arena where competition is no longer based on product performance alone but also on the overall effectiveness of their innovation strategies. The authors' experience and the numerous discussions we had the privilege of taking part in over the past ten years enabled us to be involved in and put into practice many of the recommendations found here. The notion of organizing intensive innovation, the structuring of lineages of innovative products and the organizing of constantly evolving technological sectors have become management methods that place this ‘RID’ at the heart of the firm's strategy. One of its main advantages is to structure the long-term view whilst also giving the management sufficient confidence to manage the short and medium term.

    Until the 1990s, teams in charge of managing innovation – the R&D and marketing departments – were expected to deliver results whilst roughly keeping to the specifications, timetables and budgets. This operating method was often project-based; it brought new products onto the market in satisfactory conditions and helped to keep challengers at bay. In western countries, companies managed to maintain their growth and profitability. However, outsiders then started to improve their performance: they acquired technological capacities and were quick to learn, meaning they were able to almost catch up with the innovators, who were then obliged to speed up the rate of product renewals. At the same time, the growing number of new technologies that firms had to master led to an explosion in the financial burden of innovation, introducing the need for far more rigorous management of R&D resources.

  • 1 - What do we know about innovation? Testing the economic and social sciences

  • from PART I - From innovation to innovative design
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 3-22

  • Summary

    What do we know about innovation? Apart from inherited ideas and a host of scientific articles on the subject, do we now have a clear picture of the problems raised by innovation in firms today? To introduce the issue from a concrete foundation, we shall begin by describing a number of real case examples in which the authors have been personally involved and which became the starting point for several of the ‘innovation adventures’ described in greater detail later on in the book.

    Contemporary innovation: received ideas versus facts

    Mad ideas? Yes, but well-managed ones!

    In the early 2000s, at Linköping University, Sweden, several research teams were working on a project to design unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for traffic surveillance. For the project's promoters, the WITAS project was a ‘blue sky project’, i.e. aimed at stimulating the researchers' imaginations rather than designing a commercial product. The researchers' first objective was to venture off the beaten track usually trodden within their disciplines in the hope that such explorations would lead to the discovery of new concepts and alternatives for products or technologies. The research project had a substantial budget, sufficient to last several years, even though it did have a specific target for direct industrial application.

  • 11 - Type 1 innovation fields: design in the search for new values – the innovative forms of user involvement

  • from PART IV - Innovative design: tools and organizations
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 256-272

  • Summary

    How can explorations be organized to ensure that they lead to high-value, profitable innovations such as the nail-holder, but without requiring costly learning processes? The sort of innovations which we think we could have invented ourselves. The first type of innovation field concerns this type of project. It aims to find a new value without having to make heavy investments in ‘science’ or conquer new technologies. There are many examples which fit into this category, such as customized mobile phone casings and ‘plip’ remote control car door locking systems. Projects of this sort can involve high technology, but only if its development can be planned – without surprises – or if it has already been developed. Such innovations rely heavily on user involvement, but user involvement is not a recipe in itself: it can be a solution, but it can also be a trap. In this chapter, we show how to deal with this type of apparently low-tech, high-user-value innovation.

    Examples of creations of new product lineages in large firms

    To illustrate the issues at stake in the context of different industries, we begin by examining the case of Telia, a Swedish telephone operator, which at the end of the 1990s was confronted with the problem of designing mobile telephone services for third generation (3G) technology. The technical norms for 3G were already well established at that time, but designers were wondering how to create value for customers.

  • Conclusion: the governance of innovative design, a third era of modern management?

  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 328-345

  • Summary

    Throughout this book we have described the key tools and organizing principles for innovative design. In this conclusion, we would like to bring the central themes into focus with a rapid overview of the main stages in our research itinerary. A few questions will serve as a thread and help understand the overall implications of our findings. How can we explain the emergence of RID in the long history of management? What does it tell us about how companies will be organized in the future? What impact does the development of innovative design tools and theories have on the major paradigms of the management sciences? Have new avenues of research been opened?

    Each of these questions merits long developments, but here we will simply give a few indications for further reflection without going into detail or coming to any firm conclusions. In fact, our main aim here is to emphasize that the current progress in innovative design opens a wide debate on the evolution of contemporary management. The debate cannot be limited to a discussion on management techniques and, although we must discuss the impact of the tools used for innovative design, it is also important to carry out a wider analysis of the issue of innovation in management today. Management research is sufficiently mature to recognize that the current progress in terms of instruments and theories is ambivalent.

  • 8 - From R&D to RID: missions and organizations of innovative design

  • from PART III - Rebuilding innovation capabilities
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 160-191

  • Summary

    Should firms return to the ‘wild’ innovation model?

    How can the R&D model be adapted to the contemporary challenges of innovation-intensive capitalism and become a model for innovative firms?

    One solution is to return to ‘wild’ innovation, when firms set up small, unofficial teams of researchers working with limited resources, in the hope that by giving them more autonomy they will be able to explore new paths. In these rare forms of design organization, the firms count on serendipity, fortunate accidents and chance encounters in cross-functional teams, between wise experts who accept ideas from people throughout the firm as any suggestion can be worth investigating (Robinson and Stern 1997). The case of the Stephensons showed that wild innovation can be experimental and flexible; it can explore new ideas and create new values. However, wild innovation has its limits; it is in fact a poor model for the innovative firm, not least in comparison with the R&D model.

    Although this type of organization can be interesting and can sometimes help new ideas emerge, it is never more than one element in a more general model, as we saw in our study of start-ups (see Avanti, Chapter 6), innovative firms (Chapter 4) and R&D-based firms (Chapter 7). Other issues must be dealt with, such as defining the functional spaces, launching the innovations and repeating them throughout lineages, and ensuring the gradual mastery of advanced technologies.

  • 5 - A model of the innovative firm: design strategy, metabolism and growth regime

  • from PART II - Design capacities in innovative firms
  • Pascal Le Masson, Benoît Weil, Armand Hatchuel
  • Book:
    Strategic Management of Innovation and Design
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    09 September 2010, pp 97-121

  • Summary

    Introduction: Tefal, from the firm to the model?

    An Innovation Manager's questions

    As in the previous chapter, an imaginary Innovation Manager will serve as a guide to the practical issues involved in adopting the potential model.

    'The Tefal model is of course very attractive, but I can see lots of reasons why it wouldn't work in our company. For example, I like the idea of two-headed project management and agree that it is really important to make sure that technical experts and product experts work together and communicate well. But there are also very good reasons for keeping separate departments and letting them work on precise, well-defined objectives. Isn't it risky to change specifications all the time to keep up with the latest market information? I'm concerned that a two-headed management system might mean too much to-ing and fro-ing, with difficulties in controlling variety and with high coordination costs. I'm not convinced that designers will be any more productive working together just because there is a two-headed project management team.

    'The same applies to the specifications. Having less restrictive specifications will of course improve flexibility, but once again, I'm concerned about things going too far, with problems regarding excessive variety or simply nonconformity.

    'The product committee seems attractive too on the face of it, but how do you organize a meeting of nearly eighty people – including the top management – and ensure that there are healthy discussions and not just sterile debates about major strategic options that always end up being too vague?

Page 152 of 491