Presently, there is a clear trend for both businesses and public institutions to move towards open or collaborative innovation. Nevertheless, engaging all stakeholders, especially users, for cocreating innovative solutions and usage scenarios is, as revealed in previous studies, not so obvious. We do believe that Immersive and Collaborative Environments (ICEs) based on the use of Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality technologies would be the right place for co-creating, exploring, experimenting and evaluating innovative ideas and concepts in order to quickly reach a common understanding. However, there is a need to design a proper method and instruments that would allow evaluating and comparing ICEs. Our previous paper presented the outcomes of an investigation to identifying and disentangling factors characterising a group immersion and collaboration in the context of co-creation. As a step further, this paper reports about our exploratory study towards the design of mixed methods quantitative and qualitative instruments for the evaluation of Immersive and Collaborative Environments (ICE) based on previously identified factors.
Companies, which work on innovative products development, encounter difficulties to launch and commercialize new ideas. Many ideas, considered by companies as innovative, turn out to be commercial failures. Knowing customers needs and desires help companies preventing this situation and proposing successful products (products in their general definition, either material goods or services). Moreover, the earlier they know these needs, the greater their succeeding chances will be. This paper proposes a new methodology within three steps, to identify major stakeholders' needs, to classify and evaluate them and finally to compare several concepts. Kano model is used for requirement assessment and classification within four categories. This method can be used as decision aid tool for selecting the needs that should be fulfilled, according to their importance for the company.
Engaging users for co-creating alternative solutions and usage scenarios is, as revealed in previous studies, not so obvious. Very often, it necessitates expensive high-tech resources, such as a CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), for setting-up an immersive environment in which all project stakeholders, especially users, would feel confortable enough for unleashing their valuable contribution. Our previous empirical study on lowcost immersive environments has unveiled the great potential of close-to-real-life immersion that fulfils the realism principle of a Living Lab facilitating users' contribution to alternative solutions and usage scenarios. However, this previous work had a limit of addressing individuals through their capacity of behaving naturally within different types of immersive platforms. As a step further, this paper presents the outcomes of an investigation to identifying and disentangling factors characterising a group immersion in the context of co-creation instead of an individual's immersion.
Innovation projects represent a major challenge for business managers due to their associated uncertainty degree. The already existing methodologies to support the innovation projects are aimed at piloting them and establishing the management stages in a flexible and agile way during their deployment. This paper proposes a complementary ex-ante methodology that seeks to aid the decision-making of companies to choose whether or not to launch a potential innovation project. This methodology evaluates to what extent the technological system of the company has the minimum required maturity degree of competencies to successfully achieve the innovation project. Thus, in first instance, an innovation project is characterized according to its novelty degree; both inside the company and in its environment. Subsequently, according to the previous characterization, the future project will have an impact on the technological system of the company. The capabilities of the firm are represented by a set of good practices associated with the innovation projects' management that the company is able to deploy. Finally, the minimum maturity degree required by a particular project of these practices is determined. Then, the gap between the maturity requirement profile and the current profile of the company is established enabling to decide on the implementation of the project or not.
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