Systemic Innovation

Entrepreneurial Strategies and Market Dynamics

Dimitri Uzunidis

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119779377
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Unternehmertum

INNOVATION IN ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY SET Coordinated by Dimitri Uzunidis

Systemic innovation is based on business networks and new business models in a global economy integrated by flows of knowledge, capital, and goods. The authors of this book consider the theory that innovations act as systems based on multi-actor interactions. Innovation is contextualized to demonstrate in what capacity a company or an entrepreneur can innovate.

The book details the management of scientific, technical and cognitive resources, the relationships between R&D partners, the creativity and the rules that allow a market and a company to innovate.

This contextualization, associated with entrepreneurial strategy, leads to systemic innovation. This book analyzes some key sectors of the economy that are knowledge-intensive and rapidly changing: transport and communications, defense, information technology, artificial intelligence, and the environment.

1
Enterprise Through the Lens of Agility, Creativity and Monitoring Method Combinations

1.1. Introduction

The term agility is now very often used to describe innovative management methods or companies. In this sense, at the company level, agility is considered as an ability to adopt a “start-up” spirit to develop new products that will be successful very quickly. In a more cross-functional way, relating just as much to the individual, innovation or organization, agility evokes both an intellectual and a mechanical ability that qualifies an ease of adaptation to an increasingly turbulent and unpredictable environment (Sonntag 2019). It is not reducible to the application of a method that cannot, by itself, guarantee the effectiveness of the company or its teams to respond quickly and more effectively to the needs of its customers.

Agility is a complex concept which, if it is to be defined, must take into account its two aspects. It is the initiative that an organization can demonstrate in order to seize new opportunities and effectively guard against threats through its ability to detect and react quickly to environmental changes (Lim et al. 2015). However, this definition is not sufficient, as it does not provide information on what an initiative is and how it is implemented. Agility is also a set of values and beliefs to which its proponents are explicitly attached (Oswald 2018). It is therefore necessary to understand both of these aspects. Therefore, this chapter presents the origins of agility, the values and principles to which it refers and how it can be implemented or perceived in terms of decision-making initiatives.

1.2. Agility and its manifesto

Agility is a buzzword, synonymous with the evolution of management methods for teams and organizations. After numerous proposals and trials in the 1980s and 1990s, new organizational options emerged to change the practices of teams, including those involved in IT development. Indeed, the latter were very often confronted with customer dissatisfaction at the time of the final delivery of the product for various reasons, including a certain lack of understanding of the real targeted need, changes in the perception of this need during the design phase and the management of deadlines. To this was added, and still is, the impact of changes in an environment that is constantly evolving and whose transformations can be very rapid and violent. Thus, in 1991, the first major gathering of researchers and professionals emerged to talk about agility: Agile Manufacturing (Barrand and Deglaine 2013). From then on, this approach to project and team management became an international concern. From that time on, even if they do not guarantee complete security in the face of change, agile methods have been proposed in various forms in order to provide a form of response to this type of problem.

That said, the first major agility success stories emerged in the field of software development, which prompted, in the early 2000s, a clearer promotion of agility. A working group of mainly IT agility specialists was set up to highlight the values and common elements of a set of methods that were among the most popular in this field at that time (Extreme Programming, SCRUM, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Adaptive Software Development, Crystal, etc.). This synthesis took the form of the Agile Manifesto, which now acts as the banner of this movement.

This manifesto is presented as a series of values and principles to follow in order to improve performance. In terms of values, it is a matter of giving more importance to people (and their interactions) than to processes and tools; developing solutions that are primarily operational rather than focusing on exhaustive documentation; collaborating rather than negotiating with clients; and adapting to change rather than sticking to a plan that is (in fact) older than the changes that have taken place. In addition, the principles are intended to provide guidance on how to maintain the above-mentioned values. To do this, each principle is supplemented by one or more corollaries in the following form¹:

– first principle: “our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”;

– second principle: “welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage”;

– third principle: “deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale”;

– (…)

– twelfth principle: “at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”.

There is clearly a fad in the current use of agile methods. But it is not the methods that constitute agility, but the implementation of the values and principles in which they are embedded. In this sense, all areas and processes can be reconsidered from the point of view of agility and a management adapted accordingly. Agile innovation has thus emerged as a set of approaches employing and adapting agile concepts to orient them towards an innovation objective (Frimousse and Peretti 2015). They are, for the most part, considered at the level of product or process innovation, but other agile methods exist to apply to many activities. Thus, all levels of innovation can now be rethought in terms of agility (Barrand and Deglaine 2013). At the company level, it is not enough to transform, by analogy, from the individual to the company. The agile capabilities expected of the individual become those that the structure must adopt. The subjectivity of the individual must be respected and managed as such, starting with its consideration at the level of the agile team (Unhelkar 2016, p. 25).

All these different adaptations of the agile spirit and the success of its diffusion are, in part, linked to the fact that the term “agility” can be conceived in an individual or collective way. From an individualistic perspective, agility can be understood as the ability of an individual to be able to adapt and demonstrate flexibility of mind as well as speed of interpretation, inference and execution to respond to changes in understanding of a need which must be addressed. Organizational agility can then be understood as an extension of team agility, which in turn comes from a respect for individual agility. It should preserve and, where possible, enhance the abilities of individuals by empowering them to respond promptly to a perceived environmental disruption that may affect the business. In this sense, it can also be understood as the ability of a group to anticipate, prepare, identify and then seize opportunities that will appear in its field of action (Charbonnier-Voirin 2011). It is a new way of approaching collective intelligence that can be considered as a four-stage process (reflection, understanding, decision and action), linked to four levers of action (cognitive, relational, social and managerial) with the collaborative project as its main instrument (Gréselle-Zaïbet 2019). These levers can be considered to resonate with the different levels of innovation analysis (product, process, strategic, managerial) (Hamel 2007). That said, their implementation requires an idea of how they can be accompanied, if only at the level of the design process.

1.3. Agility and the design process

Accelerating the design and feedback process from prototyping is one of the priorities in implementing an agile method. At the level of an agile project itself, this translates into the implementation of stages often referred to as sprints. This term, borrowed from athletics and the SCRUM method (Hundermark 2014), defines a predetermined period of time that the project team, if it wants to be agile, will not be able to postpone, extend or shift. As well as considering them in the literal sense, sprints should be considered as successive races of the same duration, in which the whole team participates. From this point of view, a project is experienced as a series of races/sprints that generally last from one to four weeks. Once the project is launched, the team is not supposed to stop and should focus on the different sprints to be run. During these periods, the team ideally lives in isolation from other company projects (except, of course, for crises). In this context, the agile team is self-managing and is, at the same time, the participant, manager and observer of its course. It uses dashboards that allow it to observe the following:

– the evolution of the content of the current sprint;

– everything that remains to be done, what has been completed, problems that have arisen or are being dealt with;

– feedback from stakeholders in special sessions called “sprint reviews”;

– team-specific debriefing feedback named “retrospectives”.

With agile methods of the SCRUM type or using the KANBAN method (Morisseau and Pernot 2019), these tables are organized from a “product backlog”. This is a list of tasks (to be carried out by the team) that are prioritized and then distributed, first as a whole, then by group to be carried out during a sprint called a “sprint backlog”. In each of these lists, the tasks to be carried out are placed on different columns of a table expressing a temporal positioning in relation to the project, depending on whether they are tasks at the proposal stage, accepted tasks to be carried out, tasks in progress, in the test phase or validated and completed. Traditionally, each task is associated with a user story (or simply a story) expressing an expected use of the future user/customer and that they will consider as a source of value for the product concerned. Of course, tasks can be broken down into sub-tasks in order to better determine what to develop. In the case of disagreement regarding the order of the tasks to be performed or requests for further information from future recipients and other users, one member of the team undertakes these responsibilities: the product owner. It is this person who should know the future users and ot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• General Introduction: Systemic Innovations and Transformation of Organizational Models
• 1 Enterprise Through the Lens of Agility, Creativity and Monitoring Method Combinations
• 2 Science Fiction: A Strategic Approach for Innovative Organizations
• 3 The Management of Inventive Knowledge: From Inventive Intellectual Corpus to Innovation
• 4 Evolution of Firms Trajectories and Innovation: Knowledge Capital and Financial Opportunities
• 5 From Shared Inventions to Competitive Innovations: Networks and Enterprise Automation Strategies
• 6 Technologies and Inter-industrial Collaborations: A Patent Analysis
• 7 Technological Change and Environmental Transition: Lessons from the Case of the Automobile
• 8 The Transformation of Defense Innovation Systems: Knowledge Bases, Disruptive Technologies and Operational Capabilities
• 9 Nanotechnologies and Business Intelligence: Challenges of Information Valorization and Knowledge Creation
• 10 When Innovation Innovates: How Artificial Intelligence Challenges the Patent System
• 11 Conflicting Standards and Innovation in Energy Transition
• List of Authors
• Index
• Other titles from ISTE in Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Management
• End User License Agreement