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Best paper; International audience; Abstract : How do design teams think in order to bring about breakthrough concepts? What are the main underlying cognitive mechanisms at the front end of such creation processes? Empirical evidence shows that firms often have difficulties breaking free from the conventional ideas surrounding products. Although prior works in creativity emphasize the ideation process in the design teams, little theoretical attention has been devoted to understand these teams' approaches to think about new ideas. Through the experimental analysis of ten design teams aiming to elaborate upon a breakthrough concept of a movable and eco-friendly Antarctica museum, we examine the thought processes used to follow or go beyond the existing museums. This research suggests that thinking outside the box does not follow the two-steps funnel model in which idea generation is separated from selection. Our results better support a process where breakthrough concepts result from the continuous reconfiguration of known properties and unknown properties. Our findings indicate that elaborating a breakthrough concept toward an "ecosystem of properties" approach (i.e. connected network of solutions) outperforms the "primer concept fixation" (i.e. attachment to first solutions) and "random exploration" approaches (i.e. free generation of many isolated solutions). Managerial recommendations to assist design teams in pursuing an "ecosystem of properties" approach are provided.

International audience; Organizations often launch exploration projects (EP) aiming at developing innovative products (or services) by the exploration of new technologies, users, ecosystems or business models. Because a fundamental purpose of any project is to create value, the approach of value management (or value engineering) has been largely adopted in the organizations to manage the projects. However, the fact to move beyond the existing markets and the established technologies imply great difficulties and uncertainties for managing creative projects. Indeed, because exploration projects precisely aim to invent products (or services) that do not exist before, the value to create is unknown at the start of such project. So, what does value management precisely mean in situation of exploration project? This research aims to clarify the nature, the beneficiaries, and the ways to manage the value in such situations. After reviewing the historical development of the two traditional approaches of value management in project management literature, we then show we show their inadequacies for managing exploratory situations. This article is based on a longitudinal of two case-studies into a collaborative management research conducted with a major French car manufacturer. The two case-studies are an inter-firm EP corresponding to the joint exploration of an innovative multimodal urban platform by the automotive firm and two other industrial partners and an intra-firm EP aiming at generating innovative projects for the development of the electric vehicles. We propose an expansive value management model (EVM) towards three main propositions: 1) evaluating and stimulating the creation of value with a constant comparison with the dominant designs - (2) sustaining the exploration by tuning the degree of undecidability - (3) stimulating the emergence of new ecosystems by the creation of new platforms projects. Finally, this research proposes key managerial principles for EP management and a set of indicators to monitor the exploration process (i.e. identifying design rules to break, managing two kind of design paths...) and the collective dimension (i.e. the beneficiaries...) of EP.

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Gillier, T. and Piat, G. (2011), Exploring Over The Presumed Identity of Emerging Technology. Creativity and Innovation Management, 20: 238-252. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8691.2011.00614.x , which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8691.2011.00614.x/abstract; International audience; While scientists are stepping up their efforts to develop new technologies, the ability of firms to determine the value of their technologies by identifying potential applications has become a major challenge. This article focuses on a particular phase of technology development: the emergence phase. When a promising new technology first sees the light of day in a fundamental research laboratory, its target markets often seem plentiful but are ill-defined. The inability to produce prototypes or to identify potential users makes it difficult to explore potential commercial applications. On the basis of four micro-nanotechnologies case-studies conducted within a multi-partner innovation project, this article aims to theoretically explain why the identification of applications from emerging technologies is not a trivial problem. That research analyses how technologists and non-experts interact during creative investigations on new applications. It shows that the technologists are victims of a form of cognitive fixation effect. Indeed, their beliefs and activities are guided by a stable cognitive representation of their technology: the presumed identity of technology. Based on a recent design framework, C-K Design Theory, the technological exploration process followed in our four case-studies is modeled and mechanisms to dismantle the presumed identity and to design an extended identity of technology are provided.

International audience; For a few decades now, firms have had to innovate in cooperation with other organizations. According to the literature on co-innovation, a new form of innovation partnership is now emerging: the exploratory partnership. This type of partnership is the most often established in the early stages of the design process and faces high levels of uncertainty and instability. This paper deals with a strategic design tool, OPERA, based on a recent general design theory named C-K theory. That theory models design reasoning by suggesting a fundamental distinction between concepts (propositions about novel objects) and knowledge (propositions about known objects). According to the theory, the interaction and co-evolution of concepts and knowledge is the main engine through which design progresses. The paper proposes to extend that theory to understand and to act in innovation community context. OPERA enables power holders and design teams to drive innovation projects by providing them with an overview of explored and unexplored concepts and of the activation and production of skills and knowledge. This cartographic system was tested by MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory, a Cross-Industry Exploratory Partnership, over a 15-month period. The innovative platform is composed of partners from different sectors (e.g., energy, technology research center, sports, telecommunications) and aims to build innovative projects and to devise new products and services based on micronanotechnologies. Facing such diversities, actors of MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory used OPERA to see how each project is progressing, the contribution of each project to the global exploration process, and the complementarities between the projects. Such representations enable the committee to identify the main value of a project, any knowledge gaps and the synergies between projects. From a collective point of view, OPERA permits to MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory's members to indicate their favorite concepts and knowledge areas and to estimate converging and diverging interests.

International audience; Our paper refers to an industrial practice based on an integrated theoretical framework of design, CK design theory (Hatchuel and Weil, 2002, Hatchuel and Weil, 2003, Hatchuel and Weil, 2008), to support people in management of innovation fields. This study is based on an empirical case in a new form of R&D partnerships, the Cross Industry Exploratory Partnerships. MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory® is composed of a broad scope of partners 2 which aims to co-explore opportunities of micronanotechnologies. The paper deals with a strategic design tool, OPERA, which has been experimented since 2007 and involved participation of design team work and powerholders. During two years, creative insights and projects of the two laboratory's major innovation fields have been collected and structured within CK theory. This tool permits power-holders to drive innovation projects by giving an overview of explored concepts (and still not explored), activation and production of competencies and knowledge.