If there is one certainty, it is that innovation is difficult to implement, it is risky, but it can be an important driver of success. This subject closely affects Quebec digital creation, which always offers more avant-garde experiences.
To maintain innovation, we must face the challenges of financing, on the one hand, and of innovation management, a key skill consisting of piloting the development of a product through the ideation phases, monitoring, conceptualization, prototyping and production.
It is around several themes, including innovation, that actors and institutions in the cultural and creative industries came together during the Xn Summit in September 2023.
According to the participants, the absence of A common framework for innovation makes it difficult to achieve.
Photo credit: Victor Diaz Lamich
On the definition side, for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 1 , innovation is the implementation of a new (or significantly improved) product, a new marketing method or a new organizational method.
The Xn Québec community is therefore innovating: it is renewing formats, distribution methods and digital creativity in general. Indeed, several studios market their own technologies, such as Iregular, Float4, Transversal, ED Film, Felix & Paul, Silent Partners and Lüz Studio 2 .
The aim of course remains the produced experience, and the renewal of ways of distributing creations contributes greatly to this 3 .
Innovation is the implementation of a new (or significantly improved) product, a new marketing method or a new organizational method.
However, the definition of innovation tends to become more precise depending on the different organizations.
For example, the Ministry of Economy, Innovation and Energy encourages invention, development and commercialization 4 .
For industry, incentives then mainly take the form of tax credits. They therefore cover new products for which a risk is taken, when issues, hypotheses, developments and validation methods have been identified.
For their part, organizations such as SODEC and the FMC offer innovation support programs. Research and development, as well as experimentation, are encouraged, mainly with the aim of perpetuating developments for future products.
It is through funding cycles dedicated to innovation that these organizations make it possible to integrate conceptualization and prototyping phases during the development of a digital production.
However, most digital creations are project-funded and require knowing much of the results in advance.
It is probably in the formulation of deliverables for each stage of the life of digital creation projects that a methodology could be developed that would benefit from innovation.
Among these deliverables, monitoring, proofs of concepts and validations of hypotheses are tools that contribute to the structuring of innovation and thus to controlled management of uncertainty and risk.
The effectiveness of these tools, on the other hand, could well depend on the intervention of specialists attached to the projects from their first phases.
Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Oslo Manual: Guidelines for collecting and interpreting innovation data , 3rd edition, OECD Publishing, Paris, 2005, 184 pages.
See the CURSOR system from the Iregular studio , the Realmotion’sTM generative visual software from Float4 , the Interactive Light Baton from Transversal , the plug-ins from ED Film , the L’Infini project from Felix & Paul, and the Silent augmented scenography project Partners and Lüz Studio.
See Studio PHI’s VR to go project . See also Hubblo , the first Quebec hub exclusively dedicated to 360 works (fulldome) and its distribution.
The Lab148 cooperative offers a support service in technological innovation. It is made up of specialists in videomapping, sound spatialization, technological assemblies, 3D engines, telepresence, software development, implementation of artificial intelligence and technical management of innovative digital projects.