Benoit Weil

• Professor
• Chair at MINESParisTech

In the current data-rich environment, valorizing of data has become a common task in data science and requires the design of a statistical model to transform input data into a desirable output. The literature in data science regarding the design of new models is abundant, while in parallel, other streams of literature such as epistemology of scienc...

Recent theories of creative thinking propose that the generation of creative ideas by design novices and experts is restricted by the emergence of intuitive cognitive biases. To overcome these biases and explore expansive solutions, biased ideas must be discriminated from those with creative potential. Although studies in the field of reasoning hav...

In a knowledge-based economy, university–industry collaborations play a pivotal role in driving innovation and economic growth. This study investigates the research orientations of these collaborations, focusing on the balance between basic and applied research. Using data from 631 collaborative projects funded by the French Cifre PhD programme, we...

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) models have attracted tremendous interest since the advent of ChatGPT, raising numerous opportunities and challenges. However, their generative power has not yet been studied, leaving open the question of what is truly generated by these tools. This paper addresses this question and precisely characterizes...

Most manufacturing companies have tested and adopted sustainable design methods to navigate their product's environmental transition. While successful at first in enhancing their environmental performance, these companies later struggle to pursue their environmental transition. This entails mastering two critical competencies: identifying transitio...

Some companies invest in fundamental research, but many struggle when developing novel in‐house scientific knowledge and integrating it into their new inventions. While the literature advocates revised approaches to better understand this phenomenon, we investigate the processes that lead to Simultaneous Discovery–Invention (SDI). By adopting an ab...

The learning strategies offered by science for discovering the world by generating and testing hypotheses have been used abundantly to build decision‐making heuristics. In contrast, decision‐making heuristics for (re)designing the world are rarer. This paper develops a heuristic combining the exploratory power of chimeras with a design logic. Chime...

Academic engagement with industry is a well-researched topic. However, research has focused on scholars in traditional university departments, overlooking more hybrid research contexts such as the growing trend of PhD students and their supervisors engaging in collaborative research projects with industry during their training. To address this gap,...

Cet article conceptuel vise à définir la notion de couplage science-industrie, une lecture gestionnaire et cognitive des relations entre ces deux sphères, plutôt qu’une approche institutionnelle ou économique. En se basant sur des découvertes majeures, leurs liens divers avec l’industrie et des données d’archives, l’article examine les couplages da...

Data-pushed projects are common in companies and consist in the design of a model in order to deliver a desirable output. The design of data science models appears at the intersection of optimisation and creativity logic, with in both cases the presence of anomalies to a various extent but no clear design process. This paper therefore proposes to s...

Engineering departments design infrastructure by applying rule systems. The latter are an old creation heritage, based on decades of engineering, that makes it possible to design and govern the operation of the physical heritage which is the infrastructure. Replacing the infrastructure is not sustainable in the meaning of grand challenges; renovati...

In times of ‘grand challenges’, design theorists dealing with complex systems are facing a dilemma: grand challenges require rule breaking, but they also require the preservation, as much as possible, of existing resources, systems, know-how and societal values. Design for transition calls not for ‘creative destruction’, but for ‘creative preservat...

Generative Design (GD) is a design approach that uses algorithms to generate designs. This paper investigates the role of optimisation algorithms in GD process. We study how Pareto Fronts – a classical optimization algorithm output – help designers to browse the variety associated with a design problem. Thanks to the “splitting condition” from desi...

Suggestion boxes have been used in factories to improve processes through a continuous improvement approach. From this perspective, the ideas with direct and quick implementation and visible results are favoured. This paper investigates the nature of design activities hidden behind the ideas suggested. The authors sort 132 ideas from a suggestion b...

Idea evaluation is used to identify and select ideas for development as future innovations. However, approaching idea evaluation as a decision gate can limit the role of the person evaluating ideas, create fixation bias, and underutilise the person's creative potential. Although studies show that during evaluation experts are able to engage in desi...

In the context of complex public health challenges led by interdependent changes such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and resistance to treatment, it is important to mobilize methods that guide us to generate innovative interventions in a context of uncertainty and unknown. Here, we mobilized the concept-knowledge (CK) design theory to identi...

Die Integrierte Produktentwicklung (IPE) ist einer der bekanntesten Integrationsansätze zur Unterstützung der Produktentwicklung [GeBa–2002], die nicht auf bestimmte Branchen beschränkt ist. Sie entstand aus der Notwendigkeit, alle an der Entstehung eines Produkts beteiligten Bereiche (vom Marketing über die Herstellung bis zum Vertrieb) über geeig...

Tackling grand challenges requires new forms of collaborative innovation to support intricate design processes involving heterogeneous actors. This article specifically investigates how co-design supports the anchoring of promising novelties into multiple socio-technical systems to accelerate their respective sustainability transitions. A co-design...

In this study, we examine innovative design practices on the Saint-Nazaire Airbus factory shop floor. The engineering and manufacturing engineering departments are in charge of the design of products and their industrialization, even though the factory is usually seen as a place for manufacturing, rather than design. However, there is also design a...

Over the last few years, an increasing number of agricultural R&D actors have sought to discover and get to know farmers’ practices that they consider as innovative, unconventional, or promising. We refer to these approaches, all of which aim to support the design of farming systems, as ‘farmer innovation tracking’. There is still a lack of knowled...

Generative design (GD) algorithms is a fast growing field. From the point of view of Design Science, this fast growth leads to wonder what exactly is 'generated' by GD algorithms and how? In the last decades, advances in design theory enabled to establish conditions and operators that characterize design generativity. Thus, it is now possible to st...

Transforming data into added-value information is a recurrent issue in the context of “big data” phenomenon, as new sources of data become increasingly available. This paper proposes to offer a fresh look on how data and added-value information are linked through the design of specific models. This investigation is based on design theory, used as a...

In industry, there is at once a strong need for innovation and a need to preserve the existing system of production. Thus, although the literature insists on the necessity of the current change toward Industry 4.0, how to implement it remains problematic because the preservation of the factory is at stake. Moreover, the question of the evolution of...

Dans les activités de recherche et développement, les organismes publics de recherche sont classiquement en charge des activités scientifiques tandis que les industriels assurent le développement. Mais en période de pandémie, les acteurs peuvent-ils dépasser ce clivage pour favoriser une sortie de crise plus efficiente ? Les auteurs analysent ici l...

In industry, the failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) methodology is one of the main tools used for reliability management in product design and development. However, the academic literature highlights several shortcomings of the FMEA methodology. Therefore, the main purposes of this paper are the analysis of the weaknesses of FMEA, the improvem...

The paper suggests a new taxonomy of knowledge search modes to describe the creative process of new invention design, in particular how firms combine knowledge components from their own knowledge base—taking into account both the components and the structures of knowledge bases—with those from newly acquired or newly internally developed. Using net...

The paper studies the institutionalization of a new domain of expertise dedicated to the exploration of the unknown in two established French technological firms with strong organizations of experts. The research is built in a comparative qualitative longitudinal research partnership with Renault (global car manufacturer) and SNCF (national railway...

Une recherche intervention conduite lors de la première vague de l’épidémie de Covid-19 a permis de montrer que la mise en œuvre de la théorie de la conception dans des situations de gestion de crise permet de faire émerger des formes opérationnelles inédites. L’article montre comment un acteur collectif doté d’une rationalité inventive constitue u...

The aim of the present study was to examine how social evaluation influences creative idea generation, and whether this effect develops with age. To do so, early adolescents, middle adolescents, and late adolescents performed a creative task either alone or under the supervision of an adult examiner. Three major findings emerged: 1) the social eval...

Are the digital platforms that we know here to stay? Both empirical insights and theoretical works suggest digital platform stability. Digital platforms such as Airbnb, Netflix and Taobao have experienced tremendous success, and the theoretical works on modularity and multisided markets depict competitive platform landscapes as controlled by a hege...

À partir d’une étude cas longitudinale chez STMicroelectronics, cette recherche s’intéresse aux processus de création de nouvelles connaissances pour l’innovation de rupture. L’article propose d’introduire le concept de société proto-épistémique d’experts pour mettre en évidence les modalités organisationnelles permettant le renouvellement des conn...

Integrated Product Development (IPD) is one of the best-known integration approaches to support product development [GeBa-2002], which is not limited to specific industries. It arose from the necessity to integrate all areas involved in the generation of a product (starting with marketing, followed by production to sales) into product development b...

More and more questions are currently being raised as to what the farm equipment of the future ought to be and how it should be designed to best meet contemporary challenges in farming. In Western countries, innovation in agricultural equipment is focused on a dominant model in which the agro-industry designs and patents standardised equipment for...

The expertise of the unknown: toward a form of non-destructive creation At the era of the Internet, open innovation or data science algorithms, one might have believed that expertise, which has become largely available and even, according to some, superfluous, was now “dead”. But the global challenges and the threats that we now share have come to...

Cet article étudie la relation complexe entre expertise et innovation dans les organisations industrielles. Premièrement, nous examinons l’évolution historique des modèles de gouvernance de la création d’expertise pour l’innovation. À travers le concept de régimes de création d’expertise, nous proposons de dépasser l’aporie qui fait de l’expertise...

For the past 5 years, more and more established technological firms have structured domain of expertise dedicated to breakthrough innovation management, in order to foster their innovative capabilities. Our paper studies how such expertise may be organised to identify and exploit more effectively new design paths. Our case study is based on the Ren...

“Marketing” and “design” teams often experience conflicts when cooperating on innovation projects. In luxury industries, these difficulties are exacerbated by a tension between innovation and tradition, which, in turn, causes a loss of originality and operational efficiency. Based on three case studies of a luxury champagne house, we provide eviden...

Models and analysis of invention regimes in US patent law (1790-2007) How does patent law define technical invention? Since the establishment of patent systems at the end of the 18th century, patent law has sought to establish a boundary between inventive and non-inventive solutions. This was particularly the case with the criterion of the “inventi...

The industrialization of farming has significantly threatened cultivated biodiversity. Participatory breeding endeavours to overcome this issue by enabling farmers to select a wide range of crop varieties in different conditions, and to foster genetic mixing through seed exchanges, crosses or mixtures. This necessitates the design of new forms of c...

Strategic Research Agendas (SRA) bring to the research community a prospective and collective vision of a sector and are intended to provide directions for future research efforts. However, some promising innovative areas are not always foreseen in those documents, which raises the question of the relevance and adequacy of their coverage. While eng...

This paper explores the question of the design activity at the shop floor level. The design activity has been confined for a large part in the design and the methods office. However, a certain form of design adapted to the factory remains. It is necessary to solve the problems which appear during the manufacturing process and to improve the product...

Scientific discoveries and inventions have long been established as two distinct and sequential activities. It has nonetheless been showed that projects aiming at producing both scientific discoveries and inventions could record impressive results. Our investigations are focusing on the creativity of collaborations outputs: a first agent is entaile...

For more than two decades, mobile phone industry has shown that innovation is not only functional optimization and combination but can also be a "functional expansion”. Sometimes called radical or disruptive innovation, this phenomenon leads to the development of new method for engineers and designers. However, the intensity remains undemonstrated:...

In “Grande cuisine” creation and tradition co-evolve in a rich number of ways. Great chefs still use recipes from the 19th century and may also reinvent gastronomy itself. The creation heritage of culinary Art is the paradoxical capacity to both “respect” tradition and “break” its rules. Building on C-K theory, we show that such creative heritage n...

The aerospace industry experiences a considerable growth in product development costs. Many research works aim at identifying evolution laws characterizing this large-scale phenomenon and at developing design strategies which could help mitigate it. This paper aims to clarify the evolution dynamics governing this phenomenon by studying how the prod...

Many scholars and policy makers have advocated, at least since the 1980s, to foster the consideration of use and needs of the innovation ecosystem’s partners in science and research projects. Hence, based on literature analysis, we review the role of being involved in user-driven research projects to explain academic performance variance. We highli...

Innovation commercialization phase appears more and more as an issue for both marketing and innovation management literatures. This paper studies a particular aspect of innovation commercialization, namely the market-model design activities occurring during this phase. The paper builds on an underlying paradox of the literature. On a one hand consi...

University-Industry (U-I) collaborative Ph.D. is one particular channel amongst a wide range of methods for firms to access academic knowledge. While often presented as a mean for firms to hire Ph.D. candidates or to address problem-solving issues, U-I collaborative Ph.D. could constitute an interesting proxy to deeper explore U-I collaborations go...

Visual stimuli such as pictures, sketches or prototypes play a major role in idea generation. Companies today often promote the use of these non‐verbal tools during creativity sessions, at the early stages of design. However, recent studies tend to show that these tools do not systematically enhance idea generation. Our research project therefore a...

This study examines how design theory enables to extend decision‐making logic to the ‘unknown,’ which often appears as the strange territory beyond the rationality of the decision‐maker. We contribute to the foundations of management by making the unknown an actionable notion for the decision‐maker. To this end, we build on the pioneering works in...

Purpose: Uncovering limits and potential of design thinking with design theory Design thinking (DT) unfolds quickly as a method for managing innovation, beyond traditional decision-making and product development paradigm (Liedtka 2015). DT success appears as a symptom of the emergence of a design paradigm in innovation management (Boland Jr et al....

Can a platform leader be challenged and loose its architectural control over its innovation ecosystem? The question seems absurd since theoretical works on modularity and multi-sided markets depict platform competitive landscapes as controlled by a hegemonic platform leader. However, platform history chronicles several cases of leadership shifts fo...

This article tests and extends the evolutionary theory of household consumption behavior, which is an alternative to neoclassical theory. Evolutionary economists offer novel approaches to the analysis of consumption behavior that emphasize the major role of learning in the evolution of consumer preferences and wants. As a possible inspiration for f...

Dealing with the major societal and research challenges related to antimicrobial use will require cross-disciplinary research and strong relationships between researchers and stakeholders. Design theories, such as the concept-knowledge (C-K) theory, can help spur the emergence of innovation. Here, our objective was to examine how the C-K theory cou...

Fixation is one of the major obstacles that individuals face in creative idea generation contexts. Several studies have shown that individuals unintentionally tend to fixate to the examples they are shown in a creative ideation task, even when instructed to avoid them. Most of these studies used examples formulated with high level of specificity. H...

Cet article souhaite établir les origines de la notion de « gestion » et montrer que dans la pensée politique romaine figuraient déjà les fondements de la forme moderne de cette catégorie : rationalité, responsabilité, bienveillance et efficacité. Partant d’une analyse des usages du verbe gerere et de ses dérivés dans les sources anciennes, cette é...

Decades of problem solving and creativity research have converged to show that the ability to generate new and useful ideas can be blocked or impeded by intuitive biases leading to mental fixations. The present study aimed at investigating the neural bases of the processes involved in overcoming fixation effects during creative idea generation. Usi...

La dégradation des écosystèmes est souvent interprétée comme une problématique de surexploitation de biens communs. Or, dans les écosystèmes cultivés, il n’existe pas de ressources communes dont chacun percevrait la nécessité pour autoriser une forme de gouvernance locale. A quelle condition une action collective serait-elle alors possible ? Nous p...

Every designer – experienced or not - aspires to live Aha! moments, but how to favor these moments, where original ideas emerge, is not always obvious. Design methods and idea generation techniques often recommend generating as many ideas as possible or introducing original knowledge. This article highlights another strategy, which consists in focu...

Creativity has been studied as a psychological phenomenon, and research has focused on factors that influence the human variability and acquisition of such capacity. Still, the creative process remained metaphorically described, and with no rigorous formalization. Moreover, the knowledge background of ideation has been ignored, as well as the inter...

In today’s innovation-dependent environment, organizations should constantly innovate to survive in the marketplace. However, fixation imposes major constraints on the creativity of employees in organizations. In recent years, experimental laboratory studies have proposed leadership-based methods to overcome fixation. In this study, we propose and...

Organisations trying to innovate, despite being naturally encouraged to use project management and associated rational theories of choice, will necessarily experiment in some way or another due to the high levels of uncertainty and the unknown to be discovered. Exploratory project management may face situations requiring a constant reconfiguration...

The ability to inhibit common and dominant paths of solutions to a problem seems to be a critical process for generating creative ideas. However, previous behavioral studies have not systematically supported a positive relation between creativity and inhibitory control. Thus, the purpose of the present study was to determine the potential role of i...