Rapid Innovation Lab – rapidly realizing technological innovations

With the Rapid Innovation Lab (RIL), Fraunhofer IESE supports you from innovation via prototyping and evaluation to subsequent implementation in a concrete product. Mounting challenges in software and systems engineering do not make it easy for you to be successful on the market: increasing system complexity, high quality requirements, short product innovation cycles, and disruptive technologies that need to be assessed.

Nowadays, being merely innovative is no longer sufficient. Speed is what it is all about: Innovations must be quickly checked in terms of feasibility, and must be brought to the market as soon as possible. This calls for experts to accompany you on your journey to digital innovation in the areas Digital Services and Autonomous & Cyber-Physical Systems.
In our Rapid Innovation Lab, you can benefit from a toolbox of proven methods, tools, and  competencies, as well as a lab infrastructure offering a variety of development environments for Rapid Prototyping.

What We Offer:

• We accompany your innovation process holistically: generation, evaluation, and implementation of new product ideas
• We help you to rapidly develop and implement ideas
• From a pool of more than 200 creativity techniques, we select those that are suitable for you and custom-tailor them to your needs
• With systematic potential analyses we can tell you what the potential of a new technology is for your organization
• We support you systematically: with a comprehensive toolbox that includes proven methods and tools for all phases, from ideation and evaluation to support
• We offer you a lab infrastructure with various development environments for Rapid Prototyping

Our Toolbox

In our Rapid Innovation Lab, we map four phases we pass through together with you on the way towards a new solution or a new product: Innovation, Prototyping, Evaluation, and Support. With our toolbox we support your company from idea generation by means of creativity workshops via implementation with prototypes to the evaluation of customer acceptance and technical feasibility. To make your product development successful, we offer scientific competence as well as proven methods and technologies from the area of Systems Engineering. And since not all companies have an innovative technology lab at their disposal, we offer a professional lab infrastructure where we rapidly evaluate your prototypes in an adequate environment.

Innovation Workshops

Organizations frequently do not know how to use effective creativity techniques to generate new product ideas. The creative potential of the employees often remains untapped. Some use brainstorming – which is, however, considered one of the most ineffective techniques. But creativity does not need to be a matter of coincidence, and can be guided by using systematic methods. In our Rapid Innovation Lab, we allow your ideas to flow: We can, of course, support you with proven methods, such as Design Thinking, by performing creativity workshops and prototyping in a rather standardized manner. With our combinations of different creativity workshop and prototyping techniques, tailored individually to your requirements, we can also go even further to generate the optimal innovation process for you. To do so, we use our repertoire of more than 200 techniques not only for finding ideas: They can also provide valuable support in later phases of the product lifecycle when it comes to designing detailed product features or solving design issues.

Proven creativity techniques are for example:

• flip-flop Technique
  
• Lotus Blossum Technique
  

Potential Analyses

There may be many innovative ideas. But do these ideas also have the potential to be realized? Which technologies offer you the greatest added value for your new products? Does Big Data really help you? Where can you use mobile technologies to the greatest advantage? And isn’t it about time you got involved in the emergent world of software ecosystems?

Our potential analyses provide the right answers to exactly these questions:

• Fraunhofer Big Data Potential Analysis
• mPotential-Methode
• Fraunhofer FEA (Fraunhofer Ecosystem Assessment)

Technology Evaluation

To ensure that your rapidly developed prototypes have the appropriate quality before they are introduced to the market, we can check different aspects in our RIL:

• How well is your product accepted on the market and by your customers?
• Which User Experience does it offer?
• What are your architecture-related challenges – now and in the future?
• What about important qualities such as Security and Safety?
• We not only use these to evaluate your own product, but also intended partner products.

Lab Infrastructure

We are offering various development lab environments for rapid prototyping, e.g., for:

• Embedded Systems
• Big Data Analyses
• Mobile Applications
• Simulation

The lab infrastructure combines technological equipment with domain- and system-specific expertise. Common state-of-the-art technologies and  tools, as well as development and integration environments are integrated there, as are our own developments. With our simulation framework FERAL, existing or prototype behavior components can be executed in a simulated environment. This enables us to check the properties of a planned software architecture. For the integration of data usage control into distributed systems, we offer our security framework IND²UCE.

Systems Engineering and Technologies

The transition from prototype to product is often fluid. Here we support you with our scientific competence in the area of Software and Systems Engineering.