The Open Innovation Center, slated to open in 2019, will bolster CEA Tech's new range of product innovation support services. A 3,300 sq. m building will offer two modular spaces to house project teams, plus fast prototyping workshops and an innovation showroom. The Open Innovation Center will be located near the CEA Grenoble campus to facilitate access to the know-how of the organization's 6,000-strong staff.
- Comprehensive innovation support services
CEA Tech's product innovation support services address a product or service's technical aspects, business models, and potential uses—the ideal solution for industrial companies looking to develop breakthrough products or services while limiting exposure to risk and speeding up the new product development and innovation processes.
CEA Tech has been delivering product innovation support services for more than year now and is poised to accelerate rollout of these services when the Open Innovation Center opens in 2019.
- A combination of market research and tech intelligence
For each project, a team made up of project managers, industrial designers, "antidisciplinary" engineers, executive coaches, seasoned marketers, and technical experts is set up. Additional insights are provided by scientific researchers and professionals from industry. The project team's mission is to initiate an innovation process that factors in market trends and—crucially—business models and users.
At the start of each project, the concept for the future product or service is fine-tuned. Then the real development work—which generally lasts from 18 to 24 months—begins. At the end of this process the solution is ready for scale-up and a well-defined R&D roadmap is delivered.
All project teams benefit from access to a vast ecosystem developed by a research organization—the CEA—that counts more than 600 partnerships with industrial companies each year and an expansive portfolio of technologies suitable for short-, medium- and long-term time horizons. Potential issues scaling up a technology for industrial manufacturing are considered from the product design stage, providing maximum assurance that the innovation will be a successful one. Finally, access to fast prototyping and field testing resources make it easy to test early and often—the key to making sure the product being developed will achieve the objectives set.
Here is an example:
The Hubcycle innovation project, completed in 2018 with Veolia, investigated potential new business models for the waste-management value chain, exploring platforms for collecting recycling waste and transforming it into secondary raw materials within Europe and worldwide. The project addressed uses, the market, and potential technologies, positioning Veolia to come up with a go-to-market strategy for the services and the associated R&D roadmap.