Launched in December 2018 with the LAMPAPresence & Innovation research team andMANN+HUMMEL, a leading automotive supplier, the "Time to Concept" chair aims to increase the competitiveness of companies by making the most of emerging technologies. This chair marks a rapprochement between the industrial world and the academic and scientific world. Jérôme Migaud, Director of Transportation Innovations at MANN+HUMMEL, takes stock of the work carried out so far.
Why did the MANN+HUMMEL Group decide to establish a chair?
Innovation has long been at the heart of our group's strategy, which explains our leading position in the field of filtration.
In addition, the chair is part of the "open innovation" policy that we pursue with our customers, suppliers, and academic partners. This policy enables us to bring new ideas, new products, and new filtration systems to market more quickly and efficiently.
And why on the themes of immersive realities?
Thanks to this technology, we are accelerating the market launch of our new concepts. Beyond the marketing aspect, we also want to make invisible physical phenomena visible, such as issues related to air pollution in car interiors or underground stations. Today, decision-making processes are very fast, both internally and externally with our customers.
We must show, and even more importantly demonstrate, the real added value of our new concepts in complex systems to numerous stakeholders, all of whom are involved in the decision-making process. Offering the right filtration technology is obviously a prerequisite for bringing a product to market. But we must also show how our product actually interacts within a system and the benefits it offers to future customers and investors.
Finally, scheduling constraints and reduced costs mean that physical demonstrator phases are becoming less and less common. Preliminary milestones based on system and multi-physical simulation must be reached before pressing the prototyping button. Immersive reality tools are therefore a bonus for showing how our product works within a system.
What have you learned from these first two years from a technical and commercial perspective?
We involved our customers in the chair at a very early stage. Their feedback has been very positive, as immersive reality tools enable them to be better integrated into the upstream innovation processes.
For MANN+HUMMEL, we are currently conducting a trial phase for a new filtration product. Although it is difficult to attribute 100% of the success to a different approach, let's say that the use of immersive reality tools has undoubtedly contributed significantly to this success.
Our next goal is to validate the results by applying them to the use of new tools. Expanding the chair to other manufacturers would also be a plus, and we need to start preparing for that now....
