Workshop: Laying Out the Innovation in Detail

The workshop brings together the players involved in the device’s development and marketing; its purpose is to enable the players to lay out the innovation’s features in detail. The workshop sets in motion a reflective process regarding the product’s innovative nature and seeks to bring individual perspectives together in a shared vision. For some, innovativeness will reside in the product’s new technical functionalities; for others, technological innovation will be reflected in innovative practices. By focusing on the dimension of the contribution the device will make, players describe what will sell their product. Discussion of the product’s promotion foregrounds what benefits are anticipated for all users and the data on which these judgments are based. Then, since no innovation has exclusively positive features, the discussion focuses on the device’s negative impacts for users and for expected uses. Finally, the workshop ends with discussion of the measures taken to reduce any negative impacts perceived by the project team. Then the challenges to be met are detailed.

Thus, the workshop allows for a pooling of the data gathered during the initial interview from the angle of the device as an innovation and of the uses that innovation will give rise to.

Overview and Information-Watch Stage

The objective of the third stage is to arrive at a synthesis of the information gathered in the initial interview and the workshop, in order to yield an overview of the shared perspective on the innovation, decisions made so far, and the information those decisions have been based on. The overview is produced using analytic categories derived from the user-experience and ethical-acceptability approaches. In the light of the overview it becomes possible to establish an information-watch strategy so that, on one hand, the information retained by players can be verified and, on the other hand, any gaps in information about the analytic categories that govern this procedure can be filled.

The information watch makes it possible to obtain information that supplements the existing portrait with written texts, whether scholarly or other. Very possibly, however, the device’s impacts on personal, professional, and organizational practices will have received little documentation. In that event, it becomes necessary to conduct interviews with the various stakeholders to arrive at a more precise understanding of the device’s positive and negative impacts on various practices.

The final overview, which uses the proposed analytic categories, allows for a difference measurement between the information players received during the first interview and the workshop, on one hand, and the information obtained by means of the information watch, on the other.

Providing Feedback

The objective of the feedback session with the players is aligned with the goal of collective learning. First, through the dialogue launched there, the main findings of the overview of the first interview and the workshop can be validated with the players. This stage allows for ensuring the support team and the players have the same reference point. That done, it becomes possible to initiate a better understanding of the gap between that reference point and the information gathered through the information watch. Three dimensions are at issue here. The first consists of an understanding of why this information is relevant to decision making or to revisiting existing decisions. Without such understanding, any information provided stands to remain unheard because deemed irrelevant. The second dimension relates to the content of the information and to a verification that it has been understood. The third relates to “how”, at first glance, players view the relevance of this information to their reflections on an implementation strategy. Thus this discussion allows for a validation of the information that will be retained in devising implementation scenarios.

Devising Implementation Scenarios: Dialogue with the Designers

An implementation scenario sketches out a way to market the device based on the information gathered over the whole of this procedure. Scenarios weave together the technical, commercial, and ethical factors in different ways, according to the weighting given to each. The scenario emerging from the first interview and the workshop is laid out first: it is the initial implementation scenario, supplemented by the analysis. The other scenarios presented will put forward alternatives to the first one. By using scenarios, the procedure makes it possible for players to situate their present choices vis-à-vis other possible choices and to grasp the reason for the way they diverge them. Such disparity measurements constitute the final stage of support to decision making. The meeting with the designers thus enables the players to better understand the issues involved in each scenario. Since the procedure is intended to help with decision making, the designers are free to choose what they will retain from the RSU procedure in implementing their innovative device.

Evolution of the Project: An Enhanced Device and Market Launch

The final stage consists of supporting the players, once one of the scenarios have been adopted, in reviewing and enhancing their development process. Technically, what changes are desirable to maximize the device’s performance in use? Regarding marketing, what kinds of certification might be useful? What tools might be made available to users on the website? If appropriate, what training might be offered to ensure a change in practices? All these decisions related to the introduction into society will, each in its way, aim to minimize negative social impacts and maximise positive ones.