Collaborative innovation projects engaging open communities: A case study on emerging challenges

Abstract

This paper presents a case study on emerging challenges within collaborative innovation projects engaging open communities. Innovation driven by open communities has proven to have a significant potential, in particular for open source software. However, tools and methodologies enabling the supervision of collaborative innovation involving open communities, in the perspective of creating open hardware to solve societal issues, remains at the early stages. This paper seeks to pinpoint the potentialities and challenges of such projects toward defining methods to better support a multi-stakeholders open source collaboration context. The experimental field of this research concerns the smart electricity distribution, and more precisely a public driven project of the diffusion of smart-meters in France and their appropriation by open source communities, with the involvement of the university and a public industrial company. The project seeks to study how these communities of users develop in a collaborative manner, new products and services using the smart-meter as a support technology. The first results show that the open community makes natural connection on specific environments such as Smart buildings to materialize usages of smart meters.

Design and management of innovation laboratories: Toward a performance assessment tool

“…Moreover, some projects require the implementation of real‐size demonstrators in the real situation of use (Dupont, Morel, & Guidat, ). Third, innovation laboratories are open spaces where various cultures intersect. Studies (Dupont, Gabriel, Camargo, & Guidat, ; Morel, Dupont, & Boudarel, ) show that we can view stakeholders as a “community of interest” or “community of practices”. It is necessary to adapt the physical environment and the technologies according to the stakeholders' motivations and practices. Also, the collaborative aspects must be integrated as these behaviours around the innovation laboratory generate profitable opportunities for innovation (Del Vecchio, Elia, Ndou, Secundo, & Specchia, ; Pallot, Trousse, Senach, & Scapin, ).…”

“…• Third, innovation laboratories are open spaces where various cultures intersect. Studies (Dupont, Gabriel, Camargo, & Guidat, 2017;Morel, Dupont, & Boudarel, 2018) show that we can view stakeholders as a "community of interest" or "community of practices". It is necessary to adapt the physical environment and the technologies according to the stakeholders' motivations and practices.…”

Living lab as a support to trust for co-creation of value: application to the consumer energy market

“…Different aspects of this case have been described in two previous papers (Dupont et al, 2017(Dupont et al, , 2019. Figure 2 focuses on the co-design process and its outcome (co-creation of value) stage by stage, supported by digital and physical platforms.…”

“…), different practices, etc. In other words, it is a question of articulating four dimensions (Dupont et al, 2017):…”

“…Numerous benefits of co-design have been mentioned by (Steen et al, 2011, p. 58), who categorize it in four groups: "Improving idea generation, improving the service, improving project management and improving longer-term effects". The challenge is to put the user at the centre of energy innovation, at the beginning of the value chain, in trades and practices that are more oriented towards technological innovation (Dupont et al, 2017). This evolution of the context offers the opportunity to understand, and even measure, as soon as possible in the arrival of new practices, the contribution of user integration to the innovation process in the field of energy services.…”