Hello.
Identify and evaluate opportunities for innovation?
Yes, but how?
In the absence of magical powers, I suggest you an approach inspired
by social science researches on the innovative design.
Some of these researches have been led by "Ecole Polytechnique".
The entrepreneurship is above all a social phenomenon.
Social interactions are vital in all technological fields.
Your projects will go further than the marketing of
innovative offers.
The entrepreneur perturbs the ecosystem around him but he also renews it.
Through his work, he can contribute to the ideal stated by Charles Gide.
The aim should be based on the equality of chances more than on the equality of fortunes.
As you know, the entrepreneur creates conditions for effective use
of life chances.
Let's go into Charles Gide's still actuall thought
in depth.
He was a great theorican in social economics.
He founded the so called "de l'Ecole des MINES" economical thought.
He encourages us to have
a socialy ambitious aim for the entrepreneur.
Now, let's talk about Herbert Simon.
He obtained a Nobel price in economics in 1978 for his contribution to the thought about innovation,
and his work on the so called artificial sciences.
Simon shows us the need to build,
share and make new representations for innovation comprehensible
to understand the innovative design process.
Executives in cognitive phsicology and artificial intelligence
were mobilised for these works.
This shows you the intellectual level required
for the innovation.
As a entrepreneur,
you will have to think of new problems.
According to Simon, solving these problems
would be representing them so that their solutions becomes transparent.
Your ambition will not only be intellectual but also very practical
to mesure the maturity of the opportunity that you are designing.
I talked about Charles Gide, the social change.
Let's illustriate this point.
You might all know or have heard of Henry Ford.
This is a entrepreneur who managed to identify a market opportunity
for automotive technology (unpromising at that time) : the internal combustion engine.
He mass produced an object which was formerly only for an elite
and created a new social paradigm.
He had the courage to get out of his electrical engoneering skills base
while risking being thought of as a dropout.
He changed his technology, made a market
but there were also significant social impacts.
His career is inspiring, here is a quotation from his biography.
Almost no one had any idea about the futur
of the internal combustion engine
while the great electricity development was just starting.
Like every new idea,
we expected way more from the electricity
than what we now know it can do.
Now, I would like to mention the case of Toyota,
field of one of our researches in X.
You could think that its size seperates it from entrepreunarial approaches.
Well, even giants need to identify new opportunities
in an entrepreunarial world.
Here a is a quotation of Koichi Shimizu about the R&D Toyota from the 1990s.
Engineers working on vehicule projects didn't think that
the advanced research and development group offered
useful technologies for their needs.
Furthemore, research and development engineers were frustrated because
the technologies they were creating were useless for vehicule projects.
This organisation would have forced Toyota to be limited
to incremental innovations.
And yet they innovate even radically with projects
such as hybrid vehicules or
their complete revision of the automotive architecture which deals with compactness.
This was done aspart of a entrepreunarial approaches which can be qualified as
intrapreneurial approaches.
The existence of main actors on the market related to your
innovative concept is an important date and may be an asses for you.
You must analyse the resources, the process of these companies,
as innovation often appears on the border of markets dominated by important actors.
You could be partners or disruptors asthe case may be.
At this point, I demonstrated why I think that theories
and practices you can do are not only topical,
but also in a rich industrial and academical past.
Let us now move to analytical frame of works in several industrial sectors
and of interaction with
big companies and sartups.
First and foremost, innovation isn't a balistic trajectory but rather
an innovation process.
Inovating is exploring potentialities, contextualising them in fields,
developing them for markets,
and deploying them while thinking about concepts, markets or business model.
So nothing really linear or sequential.
The notion of innovation process represents the idea of
working as well on the innovative design as on the application on markets.
To design your opportunity, you need to articulate innovative concepts
and applications on markets in time.
Through my research,
I realised that the challenge was to learn everything during this innovation process
and to adapt to the changing environment.
Thus, you should contribute to create your immediate environment
rather than anticipate the evolution of the world.
So we spoke about the world, the immediate environment
and how to achieve the right outcomes of globalisation.
For the sake of completeness, I should suggest a full course
about multicultural managmenet and internationalisation of innovationmanagement,
a very active reasearch area in the field of human and social sciences.
I will only introduce two questions.
What are the relevant markets to test and deploy an innovation?
Wit which team should you lead this adventure?
You may know that some places in the world are more likely
to begin an innovation,
as well as some economical zones have specific qualities.
For example, Kaizen or Kakushi in Japan or Jugaad in India
and so on.
Tha chance to build all these international ramifications
for the first time is the asset of a technological startup.
Large groups already have subsidiaries but also have their combersomness
as they already have service and product offers to commercialise.
So it's an organisation which is adapted to its actual offers and
which can reject the breakthrough innovation.
Globalisation can be an asset in your entrepreunarial approach,
carefully analyse the ressources you posess, the ones that you
could quite easily get, and make use of the media
to identify, connect and meet people
at little cost as long as you keep being agile and curious about others.
You will have to constantly evaluate the opportunity for innovation,
convince people of its relevance.
When and how to evaluate what doesn't exist yet?
For example you can follow evaluation methodologies based on the concept of innovation.
My works show the relevance of evaluating the performance
of an innovating concept through the innovation process.
Of course, you will never have the exact values for
a perfect calculation.
But this forces you to regularly take stock of
the performances to consider.
You develop the capacity to represent
the perfomances of innovation thought by Simon.
So an innovation changes during the whole
innovation process.
Represent at least the speed and value performances of the innovation
because, as you innovate, you achieve a long-term ambition
while living in a short-term and planning in a medium term.
You must think of the needed time for the first demonstration of the innovation,
the first marketing, its extension to other markets and around the world.
Set up timeframes that you are prepared to undertake,
what you must do first ce que vous devez mettre en priorité,
or, on the contrary, what can be done later
Do the same for the values of the innovation.
By analogy with the total cost of a product, we talk about
the complete value of an innovation.
Value is often created with an innovative concept
as it, of course, generates direct sales.
However, innovation can also increase the value of other products,
for other actors, create fantasy, add value to brands.
You will have to manage and arbitrate between more or less good
value indicators. This is the everyday life of any innovator.
There is also another advantage;
an agile structure under construction.
The innovation progress concept makes you understand what an opportunity to innovate needs:
to be generated, to be managed over time, and to be built.
I suggest you to reason in an effectual way,
to start with a close analysis of the available ressources
and to infer from it the possible objectives and to interate the process regularly.
The innovative design is the position you should take,
it is much more than a simple opportunity identification.
So, what do I mean by innovation process?
Well, it means to consider what can be represented, by following Simon's idea,
and, during this process, to allow
three interacting dimensions to evolve.
First, the type of innovation. Which dimensions in techonology
and architecture of products,
of business models, are new in this innovation?
Then, perfomance.
Especially, what are the dimensions to evaluate the innovation value
what are the caracteristic times of this innovation?
And finally, the third point is the process.
QWho works on what for the innovation?
With whom or which entity can you build a relatinship for your startup?
What decision goes with what validation?
These three points (innovation type, perfomance and process)
remind you of the multiple concerns
to deal with during an innovation process.
Let's now conclude.
I hope that I made you want to innovate, create something new,
destabalise the identity of existing service products
and thus to build way more than just to seize an opportunity.
Think of this through time, your innovation being like a process acting
on three points (type, performance, process) for an innovating design,
get inspired by centuries of entrepreneurship and
social and human sciences,
and don't be affraid of opportunities,
even against powerful economical actors.
Thanks to his agility, the entrepreneur has considerable assets to participate in
new industries.
Here are some words from Patrick Pélate, whi influenced me a lot in my research
on the innovation process.
While the intense innovation becomes a major lever of
industrial competition, it's time for this topic, among other means to repare
and revive the French industry, to be tackled by entrepreneurs
and their engineers and the government.
The innovation opportunity is built by insertion in its ecosystem.
This reminds of Charles Gide's words about the social role of the entrepreneur.
In the 21st century, the entrepreneur can aspire to be socialy ethical
and socialy connected.
As Patrick Pélata said:
yesterday, a brand was managing its own reputation by spending great amounts of money
in advertisment, promotion and various medias,
and today, with the power of social medias, this can be done by the costumers themselves.
