Towards radical innovations in a mature company: an empirical study on the UX-FFE model

Abstract

The ability to successfully conduct radical innovations is mandatory for mature industrial companies that want to remain competitive in the global market. This ability relies on several ingredients, namely: (1) the structuring of the innovation process; (2) managerial principles; (3) methodological tools; (4) the presence of a culture of innovation. This paper reports about the impact of applying the User eXperience-Fuzzy Front End (UX-FFE) model, which brings together the systemic innovation process with the social, economical, and methodological aspects on the outcomes of the innovation process. Firstly, it appears that the operational performance of the upstream innovation process relies on the quality of the social context, intrinsic to the group of co-creators, corresponding to the reported perceived experience. Secondly, the UX-FFE model application, therefore, allows optimizing the upstream innovation process performance. Indeed, we argue that the evaluation of the co-creators perceived experience brings new opportunities to optimize the operational performance of the upstream innovation process. The first part of this paper presents deeper a theoretical model, named UX-FFE, which combines a UX approach with an upstream innovation process (FFE). The main interest of this UX-FFE model is that it allows evaluating the social aspect of the upstream innovation process, which may be detrimental to the success of radical innovation projects in mature companies. The second part presents the results of previous experiments that validated the model. The results allow the design of an instrument dedicated to the evaluation of the user experience of co-creators in the ideation stage. Finally, the third part reports about the experimentation of the UX-FFE in a mature company. Results present the impact of the co-creators' experience on the performance of radical innovation projects.

Innovation Strategies of Mature Resilient Businesses during the Covid-19 crisis

“…It fits well with Schumpeter's "creative destruction" for whom radical innovation is the destruction of the existing systems by novelty [2]. The work of Garcia and Calantone supports this definition in more detail and characterizes radical innovation as an innovation that causes market and technology discontinuities at macro and micro levels [15]. More generally, a radical innovation allows improving the performance of the dominant design.…”

“…In contrast, and in order to survive on long terms, an industrial company must create radical innovations [13], [14]. The creation of radical innovation is touchy to manage for many practitioners [15]. According to Rajapathirana and Hui's study, the innovation capability is the most required component for developing effective radical innovation outcomes within a firm.…”

Investigating the Impact of Visual Representations during Ideation: Towards Immersive eXperience Design

“…The above-mentioned series of study takes place in the business sector of rooms furnishing within public, professional or private building spaces. These studies will reuse and extend our previous work on Immersive Virtual Environment (IVE) and Immersive Collaborative Environment (ICE) [3,4,5], including UX [6,7,8], Fuzzy Front-End (FFE) model [9,10] and IX [11].…”

Mixed Methods Utilisation in Innovation Management Research: A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Summary

“…Theoretical papers (Lecossier et al 2019a(Lecossier et al , 2019bEdling and Danks 2018;(McAdam and Debackere 2018;Guidice et al 2016;Spiegel and Marxt 2015;Titarenko et al 2014) were not included in our analysis.…”