Confidence and Technology: Two Dimensions to Open and Agile Innovation Applied to Energy

Open Innovation is a widely explored field of research and many technologies have been developed to support the involvement of users, or other external stakeholders of a company, in its distributed co-creation process, i.e. when actors work asynchronously and at geographical distance. One of the fundamental parameters to the success of distributed collaborative approaches is the trust that the actors have in each other, in the current process and in technology. However, the notion of trust is still rarely used as a parameter for piloting and supporting co-creation project deployment. The lack of understanding of the mechanisms involved seems to explain this situation. Using the analysis of two case studies of co-creation in the field of energy, this paper proposes to identify the levers, notably technological ones, favoring the confidence between stakeholders and by extension the agility of the process. In addition to illuminating these practices, this paper provides a first co-creation project management framework for practitioners, through the design of the "co-con" model.