Introduction
General Presentation
“Innovation is everything in the economy that is either not being done, or not being done again.” - Dimitri Uzunidis
Agility, flexibility and rapid adaptation to change are becoming the key words for growth and development in our society. Finding new ways of doing things and creating something new out of what already exists remains essential when facing crises (economic, social and environmental). The ability to innovate is therefore the main condition for maintaining the competitiveness and performance of companies, regions and territories in a changing context. innovative activity has long been considered a driving force for “progress”, but its impact on the transformation of socio-economic systems is greater when a succession of profound changes are introduced on broader scales (organizational, social, environmental, political, behavioral, etc.). Achieving these transformations requires the mobilization of resources, information, knowledge and networks of specific actors in order to guide innovation efforts to respond to more global challenges such as reducing environmental impacts, building resilience, and improving health, safety and people’s well-being. Through what mechanisms and under what conditions does innovation enable more radical changes that progressively and sustainably reorient our modes of development? This is the overall question that this two-volume encyclopedic book answers, by mobilizing a set of interdisciplinary theories and concepts devoted to the study of innovation.
Innovation, in fact, consists of the design and marketing of new goods and technologies, the application of new working methods or the conquest of new markets. Today’s knowledge-based economy implies that innovation is the result of greater interaction between businesses, universities, public institutions, consumers and citizens. Innovation networks create new knowledge and contribute to the diffusion of new socio-economic and technological models, through new modes of production and distribution. Innovation results from technological, organizational and commercial changes.
How do organizations design and manage innovation processes? What strategies and management tools do they apply for the concrete implementation of innovation processes? What role do innovation policies play in driving these processes? How does innovation impact competitiveness and performance? This involves analyzing companies’ technological opportunities, organizational strategies and the integrated management of research and development, marketing and financial projects, etc.
This book is dedicated to the study of innovation. Theoretical reminders are associated with the discussion of concepts. Written in a didactic way, the reader will easily be able to situate the current debates around the need for technological and social innovation and the imperative of creating a climate conducive to the launch of large-scale innovation processes, because the current socio-economic stakes are as important as they are global. The book consists of two volumes. The first one is devoted to the presentation of the basic concepts. Its aim is to provide a broad and precise overview of the fundamental issues addressed by economists, historians and engineers specializing in innovation. The second volume contains a set of studies of current concepts and opens the debate on the evolution of the concept of innovation in the years to come.
The innovation process has a causal relationship with a problem – technological, economic, social – posed to the market economy and identified consciously or unconsciously by its actors (companies, entrepreneurs, consumers, etc.). Innovation is thus linked to the search for the optimal solution to the problem posed. This presupposes the use of knowledge and information from practice, experience and scientific activity. Innovation is itself a cumulative and historical process defined by six major characteristics highlighted in this book: (a) the impacts of innovation are difficult to predict; (b) the scale of diffusion of innovation is difficult to calculate; (c) innovative activities are asymmetric and staggered in time; (d) the time of learning, execution and diffusion plays a crucial role in the act of innovating; (e) the business environment conditions the time, scale, nature and impacts of innovation; and (f) innovations are interdependent.
In new approaches to innovation, the entrepreneur and the company are studied through their skills and their function of resource creation. Gradual or radical innovation thus becomes endogenous and is integrated into a complex process characterized by a lot of feedback and interactions in production and marketing networks: clusters, sectors and territorial or national innovation systems. The innovative organization is presented as a dynamic system composed of specific and diversified skills. Through the acquisition, combination and mobilization of these competencies, the innovator (entrepreneur or organization) can create technological resources and evolve the relationships it maintains with its environment. This explains the importance of design, application and development management in the implementation of an innovation process. An innovation system (sectoral, territorial or national) mobilizes a set of knowledge and skills resulting from learning processes and integrated into its memory. This knowledge must be enriched in order to be valorized by technological, organizational and commercial innovation. The survival of the system depends on its capacity to innovate, which enables it to face external aggressions, to transform and endure. External stimuli (competition, product substitutability, innovation policies, etc.) are generated by the economic context and affect the means of selection of entrepreneurs, companies and other public or private institutions. Selection procedures are shaped by the business climate: the nature of the product market, the availability of capital and labor, the pace of innovation, the effects of public policies, etc. They can, therefore, create alternatives to the mode of operation, management and production of a given firm (of an organization or, more generally, of a particular innovation system). It is thus clear that the effectiveness of innovation management is highly dependent on the internal capacity to seize external opportunities. The authors of this book repeatedly stress that innovation is part of the dynamic growth model based on uncertainty, risk and profit. The “flaws” that characterize an economic system are, however, important sources of opportunities for investment, production and the diffusion of innovations.
The richness of this book is the result of the reflections developed within the Research Network on Innovation (RNI) and carefully selected to take into account current and historical analyses, the relationship between technological mutations and social change, and the presentation and perspective of management, strategies and innovation policies. The authors are among the most eminent specialists of the Network, whose main objectives are the study of innovation processes in today’s information and knowledge society, the analysis of the intensification of links between the worlds of research and business, and the examination of the modes of appropriation and management of innovation by companies from a global as well as local or sectoral perspective. The Network has more than 1,500 researchers in 36 countries specializing in the multidisciplinary study of innovation: economics, management, engineering, sociology, history, law, epistemology, anthropology and psychology of the innovator.
The guiding principle of the studies presented in the two volumes allows us to understand the systemic nature of innovations and to reflect on their potential for dissemination and application, to study how innovations question our categories of thought and challenge the traditional mapping of knowledge... to think about the meaning of innovation.
This book is the continuation of a set of books dedicated to the study of innovation in the “Innovation in Engineering and Technology” Set published by ISTE and Wiley:
– Innovation Engines: Entrepreneurs and Enterprises in a Turbulent World (2017).
– Science, Technology and Innovation Culture (2018);
– Collective Innovation Processes: Principles and Practices (2018);
Divided across two volumes, it is composed of four long chapters on epistemology, economics, management and engineering that trace the contours of the holistic conception of innovation and continues with 81 shorter chapters that
