Topics

Open innovation, collaborations in innovation, innovation networks

Participatory innovation, participatory management, leadership of participation

Business intelligence, knowledge discovery, knowledge management in innovation

Complexity view on the management of innovation & creativity

The innovation process has become more and more open in the last decades, as firms meet increasingly tough technological, financial and market challenges. Collaborations with innovation partners are a way to face such challenges. The projects that we lead in this topic look at the various collaboration configurations and the subsequent managerial issues. We studied university-industry collaborations, heterogeneity in collaborations (size, sector, etc.), open innovation teams. In this topic, we are currently interested two emergent questions:

• the increasing integration of the customer (would he/she be a client, a citizen or a patient) in the innovation process; this is particularly relevant in service innovation where the customer is part of the solution;

• informal collaborations in regional eco-systems, and the way they can help very small companies to face the complexity of innovation.

Some publications

• A. Castiaux (2007). “Radical innovation in established organizations: Being a knowledge predator.” Journal of Engineering and Technology Management, vol. 24, pp. 36-52.

• A. Den Ambtman, W. Hammedi, A.C. Van Riel (2015). “Caring for Service Innovation and Coordination Project Portfolio Management in a Hospital.” in Proceedings of the 14th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS), Shanghai, China.

• J. Hermans, A. Castiaux, M. Dejardin, S. Lucas (2010). “Configuration in the flesh: challenges in publicly promoted clusters.” Journal of Technology Transfer, Vol. 37(5), pp. 609-630.

• J. Virlée, W. Hammedi & V. Parida (2015). “Open Innovation Implementation in the Service Industry: Exploring Practices, Sub-practices and Contextual Factors.” Journal of Innovation Management. Vol 3(2), pp. 106-130

• J. Virlée & W. Hammedi (2015). “Exploration of Chronic Diseases healthcare service systems: The effects of roles discrepancies and roles congruences.” in Proceedings of the 14th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS), Shanghai, China.

If innovation is more and more open through R&D collaborations, it also opens to actors that were not taken into account in this process before. Organisations are more and more aware that each employee is a possible source of ideas and creativity. Internal and external actors are integrated in co-working initiatives, living labs where customers and citizens co-experiment innovation with researchers are supported by innovation policies… We are interested in the study of those new innovation phenomena and the managerial and leadership challenges that they imply.

Additionally to the managerial questions, this topic raises some philosophical and sociological questions. In the design of very sensitive information systems requirements related to their social acceptability and their ethical framing have to be taken into account at the starting stage of the innovation process. The scientific but also democratic challenge is to create ‘a public’ and to set up deliberative approach for very innovative and sensitive projects, for which, due to their social invisibility, there are no public, no opinion, no debate.

Some publications

• A. Castiaux & S. Pâque (2009). “Participative innovation: when innovation becomes everyone's business.” International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, Vol. 10(2), pp. 111-121.

• A. Den Ambtman & W. Hammedi (2012). “Co-working spaces: Collaborative Consumption or Collaborative Innovation?” Research report, WSL-Incubator of Engineering Sciences.

• H. Greif, A. Lasen, L. Hjorth, C. Lobet-Maris (2011). Cultures of participation: media practices and literacy. Berlin, Peter Lang. 249 pages.

• W. Hammedi & T. Leclercq (2015). “La co-création, une autre vision de la gestion.” In Le nouvel ordre digital, Beebooks Editions.

• W. Hammedi & C. Lepère (2015). Le nouvel ordre digital. Bebooks Editions.

• T. Leclercq, W. Hammedi and I. Poncin (Forthcoming). “Ten Years of Value Cocreation: An Integrative Review”. Recherche et Applications Marketing.

• C. Lobet-Maris & N. Grandjean (2012), “Les corps ne mentent pas. Traversée éthique d’une technologie”, Gérer et Comprendre, N°107, pp. 4-15

• M. Mahaux & A. Castiaux (2015). “Participation and Open Innovation for Sustainable Software Engineering.” in Green in Software Engineering, Calero & Piattini (Eds.), Springer.

Innovation is a complex process that takes place in uncertain environments. Moreover, its complexity has increased for different reasons: integration of partners in the innovation process leading to innovation networks and ecosystems, evolution and increasing complexity of technologies, participation of the personnel in intrapreneurship projects, etc. To study those complex patterns of innovation, we use alternative methods coming from mathematics, physics and engineering, as (social) network analysis, agent-based simulations or system dynamics. The association of such research techniques with more traditional methods in social sciences is a promising way to combine field results with virtual experimentation, with the aim to enrich the perspectives of the researcher.

Some publications

• J.Ph. Timsit, A. Castiaux et al. (2015). “The Effect of Market-Pull vs. Resource-Push Orientation on Performance when Entering New Markets.” Journal of Business Research, Vol. 68(9), pp. 2005-2014.

• A. Castiaux (2015). “Créativité et innovation face à la complexité de l’environnement :

une analyse basée sur les sciences de la complexité.” in Actes du Colloque Le travail de demain sera-t-il entrepreneurial?, Université de Laval, Québec, Canada.

• I. Linden et M. Motte (2014). “A Reflection of the EWG-DSS's Life through the Application of SNA Techniques to its Publications.” in Proceedings of the Joint International Conference of the INFORMS GDN Section and the EURO Working Group on DSS. Toulouse University, pp. 158-167.

• F. Dargam, I. Linden, S. Liu, R. Ribeiro and P. Zaraté (2013). “The Development Roadmap of the EWG-DSS Collab-Net Project: A Social Network Perspective of DSS Research Collaboration in Europe.” Decision Support Systems II - Recent Developments Applied to DSS Network Environments. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol 164, pp. 1-18.

Structured and unstructured data is more and more available under digital format all over organisations. This constitutes a considerable source of information and knowledge, its exploitation require both technical and managerial considerations. Information Technologies (IT) address the technical challenges of data integration, data mining, knowledge extraction and visualisation. The real insight to business is only achieved when IT systems are integrated within operations, knowledge management and decision processes that integrates human and business factors as the users, their experiences and the business strategy.

Some publications

• C. Burnay, I. Jureta, I. Linden and S. Faulkner (2014). “A Framework for the Operationalization of Monitoring in Business Intelligence Requirements Engineering.” Software and Systems Modeling.

• C. Colot et I. Linden (2015). "From Mobile Data Towards Better Customer Knowledge: Proposals for an Information Framework”. in The 6th International Conference on Ambient Systems, Networks and Technologies (ANT-2015), the 5th International Conference on Sustainable Energy Information Technology (SEIT-2015). Procedia Computer Science, Vol. 52, Elsevier, pp. 75-82.

• J. Hermans and A. Castiaux (2015). “Contingent knowledge transfers in university-industry R&D projects.” Accepted in Knowledge Management Research and Practice.

• I. Linden, M. Derbali, G. Schwanen, J.-M. Jacquet, R. Ramdoyal and C. Ponsard (2014). “Supporting Business Process Exception Management by Dynamically Building Processes Using the BEM Framework.” Decision Support Systems III - Impact of Decision Support Systems for Global Environments. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 184, Springer Verlag, pp. 67-78.

• I. Linden, J.-M. Jacquet, G. Ospina and M. Staicu (2012) “Support to Collaboration for Wealth and Estate Planning Using the SEPlanS Platform.” Decision Support Systems - Collaborative Models and Approaches in Real Environments. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 121, Springer, pp. 121-133.

• I. Linden (2014). “Proposals for the integration of interactive dashboards in business process monitoring to support resources allocation decisions” Journal of Decision Systems, Vol. 23, Numéro 3, pp. 318-332.

• S. Liu, S, J. Moizer, P. Subramaniam, M. Leat and I. Linden (2010), “Decision Support for ERP-based Production Management: a Business Intelligence Perspective.” in Proceedings of the 15th IFIP WG8.3 International Conference on Decision Support Systems.

• R. Ramdoyal, C. Ponsard, M. Derbali, G. Schwanen, I. Linden and J.-M. Jacquet (2013). “A Generic Workflow Metamodel to Support Resource-aware Decision Making.” in ICEIS 2013 - Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems. Vol. 3, pp. 243-250.

Space, creativity and sociology

The first ambition is to explore, with a sociological approach, the context and the process of creativity as set up by various artists in the fields of plastic arts and design and to question the similarities and the transferability of these patterns of creativity to and for those which are developed in other fields as scientific research, urban management or organizational design. Based on this observation, the second ambition is to question the new places set up to foster creativity and creativity sharing, as fab labs or co-creative spaces. Those spaces raise interesting sociological tensions between social/collective and individual/personal.

Some publications

This topic is the most emerging one of our research team. Preliminary contributions can be found at https://humuscreativity.wordpress.com.

Innovation decision-making and leadership of innovation teams

The decision making in these stages can profoundly impact the return on investment in new product development spending, the success to introduce new products to the market but also could has the potential to reshape the overall innovation strategy of a company. Beyond clearing the innovation process from the unwanted ideas before they eat up resources, the selection of the new product development ideas should also ensure that the screened ideas could create or at least match with market opportunities. Acting in highly changing environment, the decision-making in the innovation process is expected to be very dynamic in terms of criteria that should be used added to the nature of information to be considered. Furthermore, in these dynamic settings, the screening decision-making is likely to become very much dependent on the capabilities of the decision-makers to sense and seize external opportunities.

Some publications

• W. Hammedi, A.C. Van Riel and Z. Sasovova (2012). “Increasing New Product Proposal Screening Performance through Transactive Memory Systems: A Field Study.” Journal of Product Innovation Management Vol. 30(2), pp. 316-330

• W. Hammedi, A.C. Van Riel, Z. Sasovova (2011). “Antecedents and Consequences of Reflexivity in New Product Idea Screening.” Journal of Product Innovation Management, Vol. 28(5), pp. 662-679

• W. Hammedi & A. Den Ambtman (2014). “Optimizing portfolio decision-making in service innovation.” Paper presented at EGOS, The Netherlands.

• W. Hammedi & A. Den Ambtman (2013). “Optimizing portfolio decision-making in service innovation: a conceptual framework.” in Proceedings of the 13th International Research Symposium on Service Excellence in Management (QUIS), Karlstadt, Sweden.

• W. Hammedi, A.C. Van Riel and Z. Sasovova (2015). “Screening committee information-processing capabilities: Effects on decision-making performance.” (Under review, Organization Science).

• A. Ponselet, A. Castiaux & I. Jureta (2015). “Balancing formal and informal information in strategic decision-making.” Working paper.

• A.C. Van Riel, J. Semeijn, W. Hammedi and J. Hensler (2010). “Technology-Based Service Proposal Screening: antecedents of decision making effectiveness.” Management Decision, Vol. 49(5), pp. 762-783.