How can we increase our innovation potential?

Innovation is an omnipresent notion. However, not everyone is talking about the same thing. This may explain certain difficulties in "generalizing" innovation in our economic fabric.

.1- Need for cohesion and coordination in innovation

Today, innovation is a socio-economic necessity. It is enough to look at the terms often used by misuse of language in all fields (politics, economics, marketing, etc.) to realize the importance of this notion in our modern world.

To promote this need to innovate, industry, research, and politicians have mobilized to set up actions favorable to companies (funding, methods, organizations, etc.) wishing to innovate.

However, according to certain consulting firms, out of 500,000 new products per year, only 2.2% are real innovations.

It is, therefore, necessary to improve our innovation approaches by moving to a phase of cohesion and coordination of means and actors of innovation at local, regional, national, and European levels.

Like the OST (Science Organization of Work) which became GI (Industrial Engineering) in the 20th century, we must create the OIT (Organization of Innovation at Work) for greater control of innovation in our society.

2- Agree on what we mean when we talk about innovation

One of the causes of the status quo with regard to the development of our "culture of innovation" lies in our difficulty in agreeing on what is meant by "innovation". Indeed, innovation is a polysemous concept.

Innovation: a result

For Schumpeter, “innovation corresponds to the first commercial use of a product or a process that had never been exploited before” [Schumpeter 1940]. Innovation is therefore an action that leads to a result that can also be called an innovation.

Innovation: a process

For others, innovation is a process. For Bonnaire, for example, “innovation is the art of transforming knowledge into wealth”. Alain Rondeau writes that innovation is a process of emulation aimed at reconfiguring existing knowledge.

Finally, Bocquet, Marquis, and Myers agree on a definition that brings together all these approaches: “Innovation comes from a “global process of interrelated sub-processes: the support, management and design process”. . Innovation is, therefore, an action based on a process: the innovation process.

Innovation: an approach

For still others, innovation corresponds to an approach, to a strategic and managerial will aimed at relying on this innovation process and whose purpose is to achieve innovative results.

3- Open to “non-technological” innovations

Today, all of our innovation-promoting apparatus has been oriented toward unique Technological innovation. So much so that most of us associate the word “Innovation” with “new technology”.

However, innovation is an approach that any project leader can carry out. Indeed, innovating corresponds to the capacity to propose something new in a field, to verify that this novelty brings a plus, and above all that it is accepted by the environment and the people who will be confronted with it. We then understand that we can innovate in service, in an organization...

But to date, when we want to innovate other than in technology, very few doors open, and very few financiers follow you. . When will we see diverse and varied innovation projects? When will we be able to understand that technology will bring about innovations but that at the same time we have to develop and even devote more money to the projects of

If we do not help project leaders, business leaders, or others to develop the innovative solutions of tomorrow, we will leave the economy of tomorrow to the countries that have understood it well.

These countries are not on the other side of the Globe. They are in Europe. Some Nordic countries have come together to promote innovative projects in design, services, communication, etc. They develop specific methods.

Innovation is too often synonymous with risk. However, innovation in the 21st century cannot be piloted as at the end of the 20th.

It must be structured and equipped, it must be based on tools that have already proven themselves (functional analysis, value analysis, etc.) but also on new professions, new tools such as sensory design, cognitive design, joint trend analysis, etc.