Sylvain Fleury - Immersive Technologies to Accelerate Innovation: How Virtual and Augmented Reality Enables the Co-Creation of Concepts

The need for change in a company often translates into a real need to adapt in order to survive, especially in a constrained environment; in other words, it is a matter of innovating or dying. This was well illustrated during recent crises, for example in 2008 with the financial crisis, when, even under reduced resources, the accelerated change toward an open innovation model with external partners, academics, customers and suppliers, enabled us to prepare for the rebound after the crisis. More recently, during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the rapid use of digitalization and the electrification of transport are already preparing us for environmental challenges, particularly related to global warming and the necessary reduction in the use of fossil fuels. In this changing world, the innovation process facilitates change and creates a positive, continuous and visible dynamic. This process is useful for companies to focus efforts at the right time, with the right intensity, in the right place, with competent and prepared teams. The notions of market and temporality are also crucial. Without a market, innovation will only remain at the invention stage, an expense for the company with no return on investment. To be successful, this implies a continuous intimacy with customers, a shared value creation process. The innovation process must also adapt to the context and make the most of available technologies, wherever they may be, from our suppliers, our academic partners, and public or private research. The meeting with the teams working at the Laval Virtual Center and the work carried out with the Institut Arts et Mtiers de Laval have enabled MANN+HUMMEL, a leading global company in filtration technology, to strengthen its strategy in the field of digitalization, by seeking to create value from digital data, and by applying it to the innovation process. The speed with which we can interact with our customers in our ideation processes, up to the realization of prototypes, real or virtual, is an important factor in convincing future customers, investors and internal or external decision makers. In 2016, based on this observation, the collaboration between MANN+HUMMEL and the Institut Arts et Mtiers de Laval was initiated in order to conduct research and experimentation on the contribution of technology, related to virtual reality, to the innovation process. This project is called Time to Concept, and its objective is to reduce the time between ideation and the first customer experience. It is about putting the user or the customer at the center of the game by immersing them, gathering their emotions and feedback, and taking these into account in real time to adapt the product or the service. It is also of course about converging, at the end, on a creation of value, demonstrated in the virtual environment, with system interactions made more visible. For example, during a recent car show in Frankfurt, we managed to put a few customers under virtual reality headsets to gather their impressions of a new vehicle interior filtration system: a situation lasting less than two minutes to explain everything, in particular to visualize the invisible, that is, the improvement of the vehicles air quality. Remembering the experience, one of them, a world-renowned car manufacturer, then selected us to create a demonstration vehicle. In the field of air quality improvement, which is one of the strategic axes of the MANN+HUMMEL Group, we try to make visible with the help of virtual reality the physical phenomena at stake, such as fluid mechanics, the propagation of pollutants and their filtration. Explaining them is all the more necessary to bring to the market new and more efficient filtration technologies, adapted to the new uses of mobility and our lifestyles, and also in tune with the new recommendations and regulations in this field. Thus, this book describes the generic results of research work validated in concrete cases to support the digital transformation of innovation within companies through immersive technologies.

Jrme Migaud
Transportation Innovation Director
at MANN+HUMMEL Group
September 2021