Avaliação das potencialidades da inovação orientada pelo design: case empresa Artecola Química

Abstract

The innovation becomes increasingly relevant to the competitiveness of contemporary businesses. However, the contexts for innovating are increasingly dynamic, uncertain and complex, requiring new models, ways and tools of management and innovation. The main challenge of the researched company is to change its perspective of innovation embedded in product development to an innovative organizational environment. Given this context, it was established as objective to evaluate the orientated innovation potentialities by the company Artecola Química´s design. This action-research of qualitative nature was divided into two stages, the first consisting of the current diagnosis of the company’s innovation process and in the second stage was developed a practical experience with twelve (12) people for, from a new perspective of orientated innovation by design, assessing their potentialities to innovate in a changing and uncertainness scenario. Depth interviews were carried out with the research participants in order to understand their perception about the current innovation process. These employees participated in a practice experience using the design thinking methodology to solve a real business challenge and after this experience new depth interviews were carried out for evaluating the potential of orientated innovation by design. Initially, it can be stated that the company is perceived in the market as innovator but after this research's academic studies and comparing with some archetypes and innovation models, it was found out that the company needs processes and capacities different from the current ones in order to be considered an innovator company. The main inhibiting factors identified, like structure, processes and people, can be minimized with a determination to bring up changes, challenge the status quo and risking more because innovation is risk. The approximation of the design approach, which has a collaborative and exploratory nature, to the traditional models provides, in the present, ways for the company developing innovation with a systemic view on the future. To take the first steps of this change and adopt non-linear interactive models and of experiments, it is suggested to start with a pilot project orientated by the design, according to the concept map proposed in this action-research.