ARGUMENTATION ANALYSIS IN AN UPSTREAM PHASE OF AN INNOVATION PROJECT

Nowadays the innovation process has become a collective activity where designers have no longer to work only in their own field of expertise but they have also to work with others in project meetings in order to make decisions collectively. The main purpose of this study is to understand how participants argue and converge toward one solution in an upstream phase of an innovation project. Our work is based on a case study. We captured video and audio data and we gathered working documents from an innovation project meeting in a French company. Our first macro analysis showed that during this meeting there were no explicit decisions concerning both technical and business model solutions. We also noticed that the technical discussions converged towards a solution. This convergence was based on a multitude of mobilized criteria that we structured in different categories. In future research we plan to carry out micro analyses of particular moments highlighted in our current work in order to understand this convergence process.