Most businesses have now taken innovation to their heart. They must maintain a constant pace or risk being quickly overtaken. To keep up this pace, they have put new methods of working in place. New professions have come into being. François Floribert, Professor of Innovation Management at NEOMA, examines these new skills. 

Major revolutions are linked to major innovations. Is it true to say that the pace of innovation is accelerating?

Well, electricity was a major revolution, but we had to wait between 60 and 80 years for it to become widespread and available to all. Since the arrival of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world has been connected, everything, whether industrial systems or consumer goods, is connected, in what we call the Internet of Things, and the pace has accelerated. Businesses have to go faster and faster. Nowadays, an innovation is brought to the market, comes into use and then becomes widespread in a matter of weeks or months. Things change much faster. And the revolution related to generative artificial intelligence will see the pace accelerate even faster.

Business organisation has also had to adapt. If we go back a bit, how was innovation managed by business in the second half of the twentieth century?

Previously, businesses had very controlled ways of managing innovation, which were cautious and took time. They sought to minimise risk. So companies worked away, each separately, taking as much time as they liked. They might take one year, or two, three, four years before bringing an innovation to market. It was what’s known as V cycles or the Stage Gate process. You proceeded in stages, one step at a time, and you had to decide whether to continue or not before you went on to the next step. The reflective process took place internally, with no external interactions with either customers or partners.

As it is imperative for businesses to innovate, and do it fast, how have they now got organised?

This competitive pressure in fact forced companies to set up much faster innovation management systems. Now you have to be much more open, turned towards the outside, even towards innovation partners who may sometimes also be competitors. To be specific, it means working in rapid iterative cycles: starting from an idea, you create a simplified first version called the MVP, the famous Minimum Viable Product. This is speedily presented to potential users who give their opinions. That avoids wasting time, resources and energy by going off in the wrong direction. You test, you measure, and you adjust before you invest any more. This is the agile method of the “Lean Startup Model”, a concept inspired by “Lean Manufacturing” introduced by Japanese car makers in the 50s and 60s, and agile methods introduced in software engineering. And that’s the principle applied in order to be much faster and a lot more in contact with your markets.

In the past, businesses used to innovate behind closed doors, now they are more externally focussed. Sometimes they work with competitors, as you said. How do they actually do that?

Yes, we’ve moved from Closed Innovation to Open Innovation. But the leading businesses combine both models: a closed circle to safeguard their secrets a bit and open parts which collaborate with partners, customers or competitors in order to go faster. The most obvious example is Apple and Samsung, who are competitors, but also partners in innovation. These two companies work together on touchscreens, batteries, electronic components etc., for smartphones. And there are some things they do not collaborate on to try to retain a competitive advantage over each other.

Has this new innovation management in business created new professions?

What have appeared are professions such as ‘Head of Project Innovation’, whose role is to set up agile methods that are iterative, collaborative and focussed on user need. The role involves getting all parties working together: creative and design, manufacturing and construction teams, and marketing teams, and setting quite a rapid pace for projects. The ‘project manager’ is somebody who is really on top of the project methodology. As well as that, we’ve seen professions such as ‘product owner’ appear. That person is responsible for defining the functional scope of the product, the scope that will correspond to the needs of the target users. At NEOMA, we train students for these new professions.

GOOD TO KNOW 

Invention versus innovation

“A technological tour de force is not an innovation. An innovation is a product or service that has to be deployed, used and disseminated and that brings value to those who use, manufacture, distribute and market it. Innovation means invention plus commercialisation. Some innovations have a major impact, they change the way we live and work. We call that radical innovation. One such was the smartphone which came into general use with the launch of the Apple iPhone in 2007. Since then, there have only been minor improvements, better-performing batteries, embedded cameras, etc. We call them incremental innovations.”