Supporting User-Driven-Innovation in a Manufacturing Company through a Dedicated Toolkit: an Empirical Study

This is very well-known that companies have to regularly innovate in order to improve continuously their sustainability in increasing their competitiveness on their market. This is even truer for mature manufacturing companies operating in a B2B market. User-driven innovation (UDI) has already proved its effectiveness in lots of big corporations; however it is quite demanding for average manufacturing companies to properly support it. The aim of this study is to bring valuable knowledge to manufacturing companies aiming to meet this challenge. In this paper, we propose a UDI toolkit in order to ease the implementation of a UDI process within a company. Firstly, an experimental study was carried out within an international manufacturing company in order to analyze the use of the different tools by different employees. Secondly, the UDI impact before and after the implementation of related tools was compared. This study is also intended to validate the appropriateness of this UDI toolkit approach in highlighting differences in the use of specific tools between different employees' profiles and nationalities within the company.