Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2

Our research process was structured as follows:

– identification of personalities from the engineering world who supported the introduction of IE and ISE to France;

– search in Google Scholar for traces of founding documents linking engineering and innovation for the period 1975–2000;

– search for inspirational international authors for the same period of time;

– search for international associations of scientific and practice communities that were created during the period under review;

– our results are referenced in two tables: the first highlights, in chronological order, the inspirational authors and engineers and the themes of their work (Table 2.1); the second highlights, in chronological order, the authors making progress in the engineering sciences and who are recognized as contributors to the development of research in innovation, whether or not resulting from the development of IE and ISE in France (Table 2.2).

Table 2.1. A non-exhaustive list of inspirational books written by trained engineers

As we have already pointed out, the 1970s clearly appear to be the beginning of a new way of thinking, designing and acting on technological systems. It was during this period that two key notions appeared, which were prospective and systemic through founding works: the macroscope (de Rosnay 1975), information and decision-making systems (Le Moigne 1973, 1974) and the systemic approach to organizations (Mélèse 1979), which was not widely disseminated at the time. It was not until the mid-1980s that this holistic vision appeared in the understanding of industrial systems and organizations, namely, the management of technological resources (Morin 1985; Morin et al . 1989) and the modeling of complex systems (Le Moigne 1990a, 1990b). These works were a necessary condition for the emergence of innovation engineering because they inspired the academic community, which was already aware of the importance of taking a new look at engineering research, in particular by introducing the notion of innovation (Table 2.2).

Finally, it is interesting to note that the emergence of a field of research on innovation was not an isolated phenomenon in France, since we can see the emergence, this time concomitantly, in the United States, England and Japan, in particular, of a discipline with an “integrated” approach to “value development” under very different qualifiers, as shown in Table 2.2.

Table 2.2. A non-exhaustive list of significant works in the international community

Table 2.3. Emergence of innovation engineering research within the engineering community in France (source: our research)