Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2

In any case, the work clearly shows that it was product design that originally concentrated research efforts in the mechanical engineering community under the impetus of Gousty and Kieffer (1988), gradually associating with it the notion of innovation under the “design of new products” (Duchamp 1988).

Conversely, at the same time, the industrial systems engineering community from process engineering advocated a “systems” vision (Castagne 1987). The notion of technological innovation engineering (Castagne et al . 1983; Guidat 1984) and foresight to generate innovation scenarios (Boly 1987) even explicitly appeared (Castagne et al . 1983; Guidat 1984).

This raises the differences in the way of conceiving what prefigures a field of research in innovation: for the former, design is associated with the creation of a product, whereas for the latter, it is a question of designing the processes/processes (the set of unit operations and the process leading to them) to manufacture this product. “It is obvious that it is necessary to abandon, for example, the belief in ‘harvesting’ technological innovation to move on to the concept of ‘cultivated’ innovation” (Castagne 1987). We believe that the precursory genius of Pierre Le Goff, Professor of Process Engineering in Nancy, in the holistic understanding of the world, is not insignificant. Indeed, as early as 1979, he published an article that was a forerunner of what has become a systemic vision of energy recommending the association of ecological, economic and technical points of view (Le Goff 1979).

In any case, research conducted on innovation is eminently confronted with what (Lemoigne 1984) qualifies as “the paradoxes of the engineer” 3: the difficulty of conceiving a complexity arising from realities held to be inconceivable by our reason (paradox of conceiving complexity and complexity of design (action of designing and its result)).

It is also important to underline the publishing activity of colleagues, engineers by training, who have acquired a double competence through a doctorate in management sciences and sociology and whose contribution to the development of industrial systems engineering and innovation is undeniable. This is a question of citing the work carried out by A. Hatchuel (Agrell et al . 1985; Hatchuel et al . 1987) which presents innovation as a system of intervention and the work (Aït-El-Hadj 1989) that deals with the notion of innovation and technological systems. Concerning the sociology of innovation, we could not follow the detour in the work carried out by Akrich (1987) and Akrich et al . (1988) in the mid-1980s.

In line with these precursors, bearers of a new vision of design and innovation, a series of works have been produced which show an evolution in the concepts mobilized. This evolution is also the result of the introduction in France of a new research theme, once again coming from the United States: technology management. As we presented at the beginning of this section, the United States very early on developed “industrial engineering” in engineering faculties and “engineering management” in business schools. At the end of the 1980s, the latter developed a research axis entitled “Management of Technology” (MoT) (Khalil and Bayraktar 1988), which corresponds to both innovation engineering and innovation management (French version). MoT covers areas of investigation such as industrial strategy, technology transfer, product and technology lifecycles, management of research and development projects, technological innovation processes, risk analysis, cooperation strategies, quality as a development tool and management of technological resources.

It is important to note that international associations were formed over the same period, carrying this new vision of the innovation process and allowing a wider dissemination of the work through the organization of international conferences. The list includes, in particular:

ISPIM(The International Society for Professional Innovation Management), founded in 1973 by Professor Knut Holt at the University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, and whose first conference was held in 1983, and subsequently internationally.

IAMOT(The International Association for Management of Technology), founded in 1988 by Professor Tarek Khalil of the University of Miami and whose first conference was held on the same date and subsequently every other year in the United States and around the world.

PICMET(Portland International Conference on Management of Engineering and Technology), created in 1989 by Professor Dundar Koaglu in Portland. The first conference was held in 1991 and later chose the same format as IAMOT.

ICE(International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation), which was first held in 1994 in France, and every year since then in a new European country.

CIGI( Congrès international de génie industriel – International Conference on Industrial Engineering), created in 1995, by researchers, professors and industrialists active in the field of industrial engineering. The first conference was held in 1995 in Montreal, and then every other year in Montreal or in France.

As a result, this influence can be found in France in a new generation of researchers. The product vision thus broadens with the notions of integrated design and intermediate design objects, introduced by the teams of S. Tichkiewitch (Tichkiewitch 1994; Mer et al . 1995) and the notions of technology transfer and functional and value analysis by J.C. Bocquet (Yannou 1998; Longueville et al . 2001). The first writings on the concept of inventive design also appeared during this period with the work of Cavallucci and Lutz (1997). Finally, the collective nature of innovation is highlighted by M. Callon as early as 1994 (Callon 1994) and would, in fact, go on to constitute one of the major works on the management of innovative projects and the piloting of innovation.

In the same way, the process/process vision is broadened with the notions of technology watch and project risk assessment through the work carried out by teams around J.M. Ruiz (Baldit et al . 1995) and G. Lacoste (Karsenty et al . 1997). Likewise, work on the systemic modeling of the firm and the innovation process in particular is emerging in the production engineering community, notably in the work of F. Vernadat (1995). The same applies to the notions of MoT and the management of technological resources, which Thomas Durand (1988, 1993) has taken up. Finally, in line with the work of C. Guidat and J.C. Bocquet respectively, innovation engineering becomes a process of value creation (Morel 1998; Yannou 1998).

We find here one of the major advances in structuring innovation engineering as a field of research, the fact of clearly discerning the act of design from the act of innovation. If design is a result-oriented process that consists of a time-limited rational act endowed with specific resources and for which tools, methods and virtual representations of an object are developed (procedural system), then innovation is an essentially irrational act that is built progressively, by breaking the automatisms and routines that an individual or a community has constructed for itself (system of uncertainty). As a result, the process of innovation clearly appears to be a process of broadening and enriching skills in order to build new solutions, as a capacity to find new relationships with an object and to go beyond the boundaries of the system under study. The study of innovation processes is definitively enriched by what will be called “glocal” thinking (or thinking in terms of global/local–local/global circularity).