Co-Designing Broad Scope Of Technology-Based Applications In An Exploratory Partnership

Joint-ventures, sub-contracts, co-developments, alliances, R&D consortia ; inter-firms partnerships have been strongly increasing for two last decades and becoming a major issue in the field of management and design research. This paper presents an industrial practice which consists in codesigning a broad scope of technology-based applications in an exploratory partnership [Segrestin, 2005]. First, we propose a brief overview of inter-firm R&D cooperations and focus on an emerging flexible organization in the field of innovation : exploratory partnerships. From a more detailed description and a presentation of MINATEC IDEAs Laboratory®, we emphasize on the strategic role of technology in partnerships which gather a large number of partners. Finally, we propose a useroriented technological design method called "D4 method" [Piat, 2005] through its recently implementation on a microfluidic technology. This method has been already tested in confidential EDF projects but its experimentation in a multipartners context has revealed some interesting aspects. We present D4 method's features with respect to other creativy tools and we finally argue that this method fits very well in technology-centred exploratory partnerships. Indeed, "D4 method" permits to identify and to manage carefully the shift from community based co-operation to complementary based co-operation.