The Innovation Odyssey: Lessons from an Impossible Project

The Spring Electric is a lower priced electrical vehicle from The Renault Group. It is the result of an impossible project that was a breakthrough in cultural innovation. The development of the Spring brought together a French company, a Japanese partner, an Indian project, and a Chinese developer to deliver a car for the European market. The Innovation Odyssey: Lessons from an Impossible Project examines four key issues central to this vehicle's development:

• The nature of the automotive industry itself and the actors involved in these societal innovations. The movement toward the electrification of vehicles is inseparable from public policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Without substantial subsidies or rigorous bans on internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), the electric vehicle (EV) would not be developed. It is these public policies that create the conditions for an electrified vehicle market. Electrification is thus a three-way game, in which public actors play a central role alongside suppliers and customers. Therefore, an analysis of these policies is essential to understand manufacturers' strategies in this area. What are the differences between these policies? Do they introduce regional competitive advantages? How do firms in the globalized automotive sector adapt to or take advantage of these differences? How can they combine local adaptation.
• Product strategy. To what extent should this technological breakthrough at the heart of the car be associated with a more profound break in the definition of the automobile product? Is the answer an electrification of the dominant ICEV design (and if so, how?) or a complete redefinition of the vehicle?
• International cooperation. Automotive design is largely concentrated in the technical centers of the parent companies: Detroit, Guyancourt, Wolfsburg, Yokohama. How can the design processes and the European and Chinese skills and know-how be combined in a project designed far from the traditional European or Japanese bases and under time constraints? Can this original form of design inspire new forms of international cooperation, and under what conditions?
• Globalized innovation strategies.
For multinational groups such as car manufacturers, competitive advantage depends on their ability not only to invent relevant products that find customers in local markets, but also to deploy them rapidly at the global level, harnessing economies of scale that a startup, however innovative, cannot achieve. How then to combine local adaptation of innovations with effective global deployment?