Benjamin Tyl

A comparative study of ideation mechanisms used in eco-innovation tools

Today the challenges of sustainable development require new products, services or uses to be developed within the framework of an eco-innovation process integrating environmental and societal approaches. Creating such offers can be sometimes based upon using eco-innovation tools that focus on the idea generation phase and ideation mechanisms that allow stakeholders to redefine problems and develop new eco-creative concepts. This paper is focused on the comparison of the ideation mechanisms during the idea generation phase of eco-innovative concepts, called the eco-ideation phase. For this, it describes a set of academic and industrial studies taking into account the different ideation mechanisms. The tests compare an adapted creativity tool with existing eco-innovation tools regarding their performances during eco-ideation phases. In a second step, additional case studies are performed with the adapted creativity tool for eco-innovation, to assess whether this performance is maintained in various contexts and with various participants (in knowledge and skills). The results showed that the use of appropriate ideation mechanisms ensures a constant rate of idea generation throughout the eco-ideation session and a wide variety of ideas generated.

A New Approach for the Development of a Creative Method to Stimulate Responsible Innovation

Sustainable development forces companies towards eco-design. It often appears to be a constraint which does not encourage a calling into question of the product or service. It is also necessary to surpass this procedure by integrating the notion of creativity while keeping the coherence of the social and environmental aspects through an eco-innovation initiative. This chapter first presents the “eco-innovation” concept and a review of some eco-innovation tools, in order to identify their characteristics, and then, the paper describes a newly developed tool, “ecoASIT”, which is an eco-innovation tool based on a “closed world” notion and which implies that responsible innovation does not have to introduce new elements in the world of the problem.

ECO-DESIGN IN THE PUPPET WORLD, A CO-LEARNING PROCESS

Ecodesign has been widely explored in the development process of consumer and capital goods. This study focuses on the environmental assessment of puppets. The methodological approach is inductive and propose to adapt analytical tools from ecodesign to cultural goods specificities. First, a generic puppet design process emerged from interviews of 6 puppet makers. Then, a life cycle inventory study is performed and main environmental issues are discussed. Finally, crossfertilization between puppet design and engineering design are highlighted in research perspectives.