Improving radical innovation methods for strategy making – Learning from practitioners’ evaluations of practical guidelines for C-K tools

➢Objectives and theoretical and practical relevance (with Brief literature mapping and key references) Radical innovation (RI) developments suppose a dynamic capability of firm organized within a major innovation system (O'Connor, 08; O'Connor and DeMartino, 2006). Indeed, RI presents the dual challenge for firms to be disruptive from the existent offers on the markets and to require new knowledge to be developed by NPD departments. Researchers and practitioners have proposed numerous methods to support collectives in radical innovation development. Some of them focus on business value creation, — as Business model canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010), Blue Ocean Strategy (Kim and Mauborgne, 2005), Design thinking (Brown, 2008), etc. Others deal with the renewal of firms' skills and associated knowledge management, as TRIZ, ASIT (Horowitz 1999 ; Reich et al, 2012), or most conceptual guidelines referring to best practices, as Open Innovation (Chesbrough, 2006) or innovation-based corporate entrepreneurship (Kelley et al, 2009). Yet, few of them gather with same attention to both renewal processes: thus, weaknesses appear in the strategy making process either in the robustness of the value creation proposal or in the design feasibility. To overcome this complex issue, design theory researchers assumed that Concept-Knowledge (C-K) theory could be used to support such a dual exploration (Hatchuel et al, 2002). Indeed, in this theoretical conceptualization of RI strategies, the Concept space contains proposals of value creation with various degrees of elaboration ("Desirable unknown" that foreshadows the value proposal), while the Knowledge space contains all types properties that could be validated by a repeatable test, even if they are still lacking at the moment of the exploration ("true or false properties" that gathers design parameters of objects). According to (Hatchuel et al, 2014), C-K diagrams are used in industry for innovative projects evaluation, evaluating a portfolio and its positioning, and tuning breakthrough. In this paper, we tackle the issue of C-K practical uses for RI strategy making and develop a protocol to study how C-K diagrams, could be used by practitioners for RI strategy making. In particular, we develop practical guidelines for collective strategy building and test their efficiency with practitioners, who gave us feedback. ➢Approach/Method From 2011 to 2014, the authors deployed the protocol on 74 individuals interested in RI development with a C-K theory approach. We trained them to explore disruptive concepts using C-K tools with practical guidelines for the method in order they acquire an ability to propose a radical innovation strategy from their exploration. The process of data collection was always the same during the whole period. First, they were trained during eighteen hours alternating lectures on innovation theory and strategy, and workshops of practical guidelines manipulation on virtual innovation cases. Then, individuals were asked to choose a disruptive concept of their own interest, to explore it by binomial through a c-k diagram mobilizing the practical guidelines, and after that, to write a critical evaluation on the benefits and limits of the method for innovation strategy making. In the paper, we propose an in-depth analysis of the 74 evaluations through quantitative text mining and qualitative analysis of improvement proposals. ➢Data/Findings Data are still in analysis but first extractions allows us to assume three main results on the efficiency of practical guidelines: 1/ a large majority of evaluations underlined that using the proposed approach, individuals succeed to collaboratively build and propose a RI strategy; 2/ In the Knowledge base, that support design parameters consolidation, the more effective guidelines concerned bases' validation rules and systematic modelling of competitive dominant designs; 3/ In the Concept space, guidelines supports the building of new object's identities (i.e. disruptive proposals) and their gradual value building through the accumulation of desirable properties. ➢Conclusion and contribution to the field, Managerial implications RI methods used to be seen as focusing mostly (or even solely) on value creation but our research underlined that a C-K based approach with practical guidelines could balance fruitfully this goal with NPD knowledge management issues to support a collective RI strategy making. Moreover, the ability of individual to systemize a robust description of object's identity (even existent or in design) appears as a key factor for RI strategy emergence and collaborative building. Managerial implications of such a result are numerous as it allows sharing and collectively assessing the potential of innovation fields.