PROPOSITION OF A TOOLS SELECTION METHOD TO SUPPORT AND FAVOUR INNOVATION FOR A MANUFACTURING COMPANY

Nowadays, companies have to innovate in order to cope with competition, and to ensure the durability of their activities. Innovation is more and more perceived as a result. Users can be involved in this process to diversify the types of innovation. However, it can be difficult for companies which are novice at the subject to set-up an innovation process. This is especially true for manufacturing companies operating on a B2B market. As far as we know, the specific features of innovation in such companies have not been studied a lot. In this context, we will try in our paper to define which are the first steps of the innovation process that could be set up by such companies. Then, we will try to determine tools, techniques and/or methods for each step of our innovation process. After that, we will do a proposition of a tools selection method, to determine the best tools for each step. This selection of best tools will be applied in a manufacturing company operating on a B2B market. A study in a manufacturing company enables to validate the pertinence of our proposition.