Innovation offers SMEs an opportunity to secure their longevity. Its efficient management enhances results.

Vade-Mecum

Vade-Mecum
Frédéric Fréry, lecturer in strategy at the ESCP Europe Business School, offers us seven golden rules for efficiently managing innovation:
• Do not entrust innovation management to internal experts alone
• Be attentive to the market rather than to your clients
• Present disruptive technologies as continuities, in order not to destabilise clients
• Learn to generate constraints likely to favour innovation
• Ensure a diversity of professional profiles within the team
• Try, and try again
• Avoid excessively optimising processes to the detriment of innovation

Necessary at the best of times, indispensible in times of crisis, innovation is acknowledged as being one of the most faithful allies for any business looking to maintain or to develop its activity. However, it does require efficient management.
“Innovation is the marketing of an invention that has a genuine impact on society,” Frédéric Fréry, a lecturer in strategy at the ESCP Europe Business School, is keen to remind us. What could well become of a high-tech pen, suitable for use in outer space, if other, simpler and lest costly solutions already exist? “Perfection is rarely profitable,” adds the specialist. As such, he believes that entrusting innovation management to engineers alone can prove to be a strategic error.
Two key objectives push businesses to innovate: reducing the cost of their production processes and/or increasing added value. Innovation is often the product of constraint. “Up to 2009, we were struggling to recruit male staff in the Vire area,” recalls Catherine Duquesne, Managing Director of La Normandise, a pet food manufacturer located in Vire. “We chose to automate our production lines as much as possible, hence reducing the physical strain involved in certain positions and enabling us to recruit women,” she adds. “To such an extent that our plant is now the most modern in Europe!”

“Chaos, another form of motivation”

At the Hérouville-based company Eldim, it all started with a complaint on the image quality of its LCD screens.“Our optical skills have enabled us to develop equipment capable of correcting screen colorimetry a thousand times faster than existing systems,” the company’s director, Thierry Leroux explains. Although now a genuine reference on the market, the company is nevertheless continuing to innovate.
Faced with the economic crisis, it has accelerated the development of new products, “5 or 6 in the space of a year”, the positive effects of which are already emerging. “Chaos, is another form of motivation,” he firmly believes.
Similarly, François Thouery, Managing Director of the recruitment consultancy Profil Progrès, and member of the Chambre Professionnelle du Conseil de Normandie (consultancy trade association), encourages all businesses not to hesitate to call upon appropriate consultants. “Consultancies can help businesses to implement the best possible practice to generate new prospects for innovation management.”

	Frédéric Fréry Lecturer in strategy at the ESCP Europe Business School
	Catherine Duquesne La Normandise – Tel: 02 31 68 88 62
	Thierry Leroux Eldim
	François Thouery, Chambre Professionnelle du Conseil de Normandie

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