Co-innovation in 3 questions

Co-innovation is an approach that allows an organization, whatever its legal entity, to involve stakeholders in its ecosystem, often end users, to bring out new solutions thanks to the know-how of each. The process is not new since it has existed for a long time, if only in the 1960s with the participatory design practiced in the Scandinavian countries or more recently with the rise of open source.

What is co-innovation today?

What has changed in recent years and which has given a whole new dimension to co-innovation are the new possibilities offered in particular by collaborative online tools and the growing enthusiasm of large companies like EDF with its platform EDF Pulse & You.

In this regard, more and more people are participating in the process of co-innovation or co-creation of projects. Futura asked the question with the EDF Pulse & You teams if collective intelligence was a source of inspiration for science. And to get answers, our media and the platform decided to create a survey on the subject. Do not hesitate to participate, all ideas are welcome!

How to practice co-innovation?

Co-innovation can relate to a one-off or recurring project, part or all. It can intervene at different levels of the process:

• upstream in the ideation phase to find new ideas or points of view on a subject;
• the actual co-design of a product or service;
• downstream, with the beta testing to improve a product or service.

What are the modalities of participation in a co-innovation process?

Whatever the status of the participants in a co-innovation approach, it is necessary to define in advance the modalities of contribution on the sharing of risks, the distribution of the possible benefits of the project and the ownership of the knowledge generated. On this last point, several practices are possible between the free contribution, the remuneration, the provision in open source or the management in common goods, therefore shared between a community of users.