OBSERVING NEW PRODUCT IMPACTS ON SECTORS VALUE CHAINS: THE CASE OF A FRENCH ELECTRONIC SME

New technology emergence is often associated to a modification of the environment of the company that launches the innovation [1]. To develop a new technology, present stakeholders have to evolve, new stakeholders occur, new interrelations between customers and suppliers appear, and, new rules are elaborated to structure the emerging sector. Companies that provide innovations should explicitly seek to understand, predict and plan the development of the infrastructure and the environment to achieve the full potential of their products [2]. In contrast with large corporations, SMEs may often lack the power to build these infrastructures and change environments by themselves. This means that these companies have to build upon the existing infrastructure, adapt to the existing environment and then over time adapt their product while the environment evolves. It is therefore that our work focuses on the interesting issues that SMEs have to face when introducing and adapting new technology and accompanying products. One main challenge, in term of innovation key success factor, is the anticipation of the potential changes in the technology itself, the infrastructure, and the environment at the early stages of the development project [3]. This challenge is essential in the field of innovation as the market targeted in the early stage of development is not always the one selected at the end of the NPDP [4]. Moreover after a little experience on a particular niche, many companies try to valorize their innovation on another large scale market. Moving from a market to another one while having a weak experience (because of the novelty) corresponds to entering new technological ecosystem [5]. Consequently, the pre-diffusion phases are important to ensure a successful launch on the market so that companies and their ecosystem have to find a relevant organization to function effectively [6]. In a specific way, one of the current problems concerns the strategy on how to mobilize stakeholders and to design their interrelations to forecast the future value chain. Thus, our special interest is a better understanding of these phenomenon and the elaboration of decision aided methodologies for design teams. One particular theoretical obstacle is the definition of models to represent on a dynamic way a specific sector: these models integrating technological, financial, marketing, stakeholders strategy aim at the enrichment of value chain models [7] [8]. In order to go into deeper details about the in situ phenomenon, an observation campaign is described in this paper. The experimentation was conducted in a French SME working in the field of electronic and ergonomic, and, attesting of two innovative activities during the last three years. All the tasks and outputs characterizing the projects have been studied thanks to interviews of the CEO and engineers, industrial reports on projects and project reviews consultation, participation to design meetings and the census of Intermediary Design Object (prototype among others). It is a long term campaign as it lasted three years. The aim is to collect data about:-The description of the first targeted market for each of the new product,-The description of the sector associated to the market: representation of all the ecosystem including customers, suppliers and institutions,