Design of a Collaborative Information and Communication Technology Platform to support Creativity in Innovation Activities - Prototyping and User Experience Test

This research project reports the results of the thesis, "Design of a Collaborative Information and Communication Technology Platform to support Creativity in Innovation Activities - Prototyping and User Experience Test" and provides details of the procedure followed in realizing the thesis. The research was conducted between Fall 2010 and Winter 2013.;The research problem was based on an analysis of three challenges observed in innovation activities, especially at the level of creative collaboration among R&D enterprises and creative teams of "Les 24 heures de l'innovation". These challenges must be overcome before the knowledge production and ideas sharing process can be improved. Three types of challenges were identified: Communication: The communication of knowledge for innovation, which must be transmitted to successfully resolve complex issues, in the proposal of new products or new services; Organizational: Development of knowledge management strategies for distributed idea sharing, which should be encouraged by the organization to create or support teams by means of a collaborative platform; Technology: Transmission of tacit, unstructured, and informal knowledge, especially using collaborative ICT and technologies Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 tools.;This thesis investigates two dimensions of the research problem: the theoretical and the practical (technology issues). The theoretical dimension examines the environment for the exchange of ideas and knowledge, which supports creative collaboration in distributed conditions. The practical and technological dimensions involve a creative collaboration model which will take the form of a platform for creative teams.;The aim of this thesis is to support the creative teams in the process of conceptualization of a new innovation-oriented product. Through this thesis, we seek to: Determine the needs of creative teams during the conceptualization stage of a new product; Propose a Knowledge Management System (knowledge and tools) that enables the support of tacit knowledge produced in distributed condition of team members; Modeling a Platform that supports internal creative team's needs and the external context for innovation; Propose the assessment of the creative collaboration meaning the user experience testing and the realized task by creative teams on the ICT prototype.;We carry out a review of the literature in Chapter 1, a study of collaboration among creative R&D teams in Canada in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 4, we perform a knowledge needs analysis of creative teams in "Les 24 heures de l'innovation". These will enable us to achieve the first objective, the definition of the needs for supporting creative teams. Ultimately, we characterize the context of R&D activities in Canada, as well as interactions among creative R&D teams for innovation, with a theoretical study, by analyzing statistical data obtained from Statistics Canada. A detailed presentation of the problem statement and the methodology used for this thesis is provided in Chapter 3.;The second objective is fulfilled by analyzing the idea production process and the current ICTs, for proposing a conceptual model based on the observation of creative teams participating in "Les 24 heures de l'innovation" November 2011. On the other hand, by proposing the new specifications that support collaboration, we select a methodology based on the law of ideality (TRIZ), in which we observe the evolution of technological state-of-the-art of current functionalities (Chapter 5) in contrast with the needs and useful operations of ICT.;To realize the third objective, we model the collaborative platform, and its primary functionalities are presented using the UML 2, Unified Modeling Language, also we describe the prototype deployment at Chapter 6. The fourth objective is reached by an experimental evaluation of the platform that is presented in Chapter 7 and in Chapter 8. These chapters summarize the results obtained by the application of the following user experience test: validation of UML use-cases user's acceptance, the task analysis of the main used functionalities, the creative performance Analysis of user (PAN) and the usability test.;Finally, the other sections of this document are the conclusion, findings, proposals for further research, and recommendations. In the Appendix, we include the ethical plan presented to the Ecole de technologie superieure Ethical Review Board, as well as the results obtained from "Les 24 heures de l'innovation" of May 2012.