Valérie Chanal

Innovation management and organizational learning: a discursive approach

This paper deals with how to design innovative organizations through theoretical and managerial insights. The theoretical framework is based on the structuration theory, with a focus on language and conversations within and across innovation projects. As a setting for the theoretical model, two case studies are presented and discussed: the first analyses an innovation project’s structuration through conversations via e‐mails. The second is an action research whose purpose is to design a project‐oriented organization to improve the innovation capability of an industrial firm. These two field studies lead to a final appraisal of the relevance of a discursive approach to better understand innovation processes and their contribution to organizational learning.

Building knowledge for innovation management: The experience of the Umanlab research team

Purpose – The aim of this research is to evaluate the conditions of production of methodological knowledge on innovation management. It seeks to present the experience of an applied research team working with practitioners of R&D by means of an inter‐disciplinary research team in social sciences. The theoretical framework aims to present two approaches for knowledge production: collaboration with practitioners and interdisciplinary research in social science.Design/methodology/approach – The methodology is a case study focused on the various forms of collaborative research. While the literature mainly considers only one form of collaborative research, the author distinguishes between mono‐disciplinary and inter‐disciplinary collaborative research on one hand, and between mono‐partner and multi‐partner collaborative research on the other, leading to four typical research situations. The paper examines empirically the rigor‐relevance debate as seen as the researchers and the practitioners.Findings – The fin...

Gestion collaborative et capitalisation des idées émergentes en innovation

Les outils collaboratifs soutenant les processus d’innovation se focalisent peu sur la phase d’emergence des idees, preliminaire a la gestion de projets innovants et cruciale pour leur reussite ulterieure. Nous proposons donc IM-Station (Innovation Management Station), destinee a favoriser les echanges et a accelerer la prise de decision au cours de cette phase d’avant-projet. Il s’agit de rassembler les elements pour decrire, suivre l’evolution, structurer et valider une idee. Cela repose sur un dialogue entre des acteurs aux competences et points de vue differents, une prise en compte de toutes les contributions et une comprehension mutuelle par l’association de la terminologie propre a chaque auteur. Notre demarche permet aux acteurs d’un projet de faire evoluer collectivement le concept d’idee vers un projet innovant, avec redaction des rapports necessaires, gestion d’historique d’idee et capitalisation des savoir-faire.

From Research to Innovation, How to Create Value for an IT Consulting and Engineering Service Firm through its Internal Research Activities

IT consulting and engineering firms generally develop strategic knowledge for their clients based on their own competences in various business methods and processes. Knowledge and competences can be improved through collaborative research projects and further leveraged for their own strategic development. The aim of this paper is to build and experiment an organizational management tool within a consulting firm. The tool allows the creation of value and differentiation levers on the competitive market of research and innovation consultancy and illustrates how to benefit from internal research activities that can be viewed as intangible resources. In light of competence-based theory this work shows how strategic knowledge developed on an emerging field such as e-health can be rearranged into strategic processes in order to inspire a proactive strategic vision within a consulting firm.

A knowledge-based system to diagnose the innovation process in industrial firms

In this paper, we assume that managers are unfamiliar with the research concerning product innovation management because this research is not presented in a way that allows for comprehension and knowledge transfer. We therefore designed a knowledge-based system aimed at improving the intelligibility of the product innovation process and synthesising heterogeneous knowledge from different research fields by means of systemic modelling. Furthermore, the ‘DIAPASON’ system (a diagnosis tool of innovation process) is described and the results of the implementation of this pilot system in four industrial firms are presented. Finally, we discuss the need for further research to improve our understanding of complex organisational processes using knowledge modelling.