Technological innovation at the crossroads
Our modern era is characterised by speed, complexity and the ever-increasing hybridisation between the real and virtual worlds. Innovating in this infinitely complex world requires a profound and permanent rethinking of both production processes and the mental representations that underpin our management practices and organisations. Traditionally, we have distinguished several forms of innovation: technological innovation (technological breakthroughs leading to new products or services), social innovation (emergence of a new social need), innovation in use (in the way a product is used), and a more blurred, artistic or creative innovation (product design, or new food tastes, etc.).
But today, these traditional boundaries have become blurred, and innovation must be global. It must allow for a new and richer consumer experience than the simple discovery of a new product or a new use. It requires a profound overhaul of traditional models and can affect all areas of your organisation: the offer, processes, marketing and management… All your teams will therefore be affected in the short or long term. They will need the support of an expert whose know-how covers all these dimensions. Our group, at the crossroads between Management, Marketing, R&D and Design, will be the partner able to support you in an innovation process which, as we have seen, is no longer based on the simple idea of a genius tinkering at the back of his garage, but must be placed at the heart of your organisation.
Speed and agility to transform innovation into a source of value
Today, exacerbated competition on a global scale and the ever-increasing insecurity of customer loyalty mean that there is no guarantee that a project will go from being a project to being a source of value, a vector of profitability and even less of cash flow. Our teams of pioneers are trained to activate your organisation’s innovative forces as quickly as possible and build a “sustainable innovation”. Within ad hoc agile teams, we work with you in an extremely short period of time to build a project and bring it to fruition, through rapid iterations, rather than a linear timeline marked by numerous and unproductive meetings. Our strength? To have a long experience in accompanying the main innovation projects of the last few years, but also to master the “unknown territories”, to go and find innovative ideas where institutionalized companies, afraid of leaving the beaten track, will not go.
Agile project mode we advocate must lead to prototyping or a confrontation with the reality of use in a few days. Because it is by doing that we learn, and only use and its feedback will lead you to a finished product capable of meeting the complex needs of your consumers.
Cross-functionality is also the basis of this project mode: innovation is often the result of confrontation with the unknown, with the difference in managerial practices and ways of thinking. This confrontation, far from being an obstacle, is the main source of progress and innovation. Our teams will be able to integrate themselves into your organisation to create the right conditions for this “productive confrontation” and to activate the forces that are still underlying it today.
Sustainable development must be the common thread of innovation
Today, the experience that consumers of goods or services are looking for has become global: sensory and emotional, it must also speak to their reason and confirm their own values. Among these values today, environmental awareness is at the forefront. Our planet has reached its limits, so your product and service offer must be in line with the shared idea that our world has finite resources. Innovation must be green innovation and sustainable innovation. Your organisation must prove to its customers that it is fully in line with environmental considerations, and that its products, processes, production and management methods will not harm the planet in any way.
Here again, the complexity of the issues and the immense variety of fields concerned make it necessary to have the support of an expert, armed with his experience and who has set up a long watch on practices and innovations in sustainable development and ecological innovation. Here again, our group is at the heart of these concerns, having supported pioneering companies and groups in the field of ecological and sustainable innovation from the outset.
Our support for sustainable innovation
If, at one time, a technological breakthrough was a guarantee of economic success, this is no longer the case. Other dimensions have been integrated into the innovation process. And these environmental and sustainable dimensions (ecological innovation) are integrated transversally into your organisation: process, business model, marketing, organisation, etc. …. All your fields of action are concerned and must integrate this concept of sustainability. Innovation must above all be sustainable innovation. And to be sustainable, your entire organisation must integrate this concern. Our teams will be able to identify the resource persons within your organisation, accompany them in the change, and engage these curious, competent, ambitious and modern players in a collaborative, sustainable and innovative process.
Groupe Zebra, at the crossroads of the fields concerned with innovation, has the expertise and skills necessary to support you in this process of sustainable innovation, which must now, more than ever, be placed at the heart of your organisation.
See : Neofarming, ASF 4.0 and Hipli.