A comparative study of ideation mechanisms used in eco-innovation tools

Today the challenges of sustainable development require new products, services or uses to be developed within the framework of an eco-innovation process integrating environmental and societal approaches. Creating such offers can be sometimes based upon using eco-innovation tools that focus on the idea generation phase and ideation mechanisms that allow stakeholders to redefine problems and develop new eco-creative concepts. This paper is focused on the comparison of the ideation mechanisms during the idea generation phase of eco-innovative concepts, called the eco-ideation phase. For this, it describes a set of academic and industrial studies taking into account the different ideation mechanisms. The tests compare an adapted creativity tool with existing eco-innovation tools regarding their performances during eco-ideation phases. In a second step, additional case studies are performed with the adapted creativity tool for eco-innovation, to assess whether this performance is maintained in various contexts and with various participants (in knowledge and skills). The results showed that the use of appropriate ideation mechanisms ensures a constant rate of idea generation throughout the eco-ideation session and a wide variety of ideas generated.