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).
It is also interesting to highlight an initiative led by engineering schools and their associated research laboratories: the creation in 1993 of the CONFERE (Collège d’études et de recherches en design et conception de produits – Association for Study and Research of Product Design) symposium, specific to this community of researchers in product innovation and design. The objective is to participate in the academic recognition of design, product design and innovation as a priority research subject. CONFERE is thus positioned as a symposium in innovation sciences in which researchers from the previously mentioned teams participate4. The community also created its own journal in 1998 in order to disseminate its work on a wider scale: IJODIR, the International Journal of Design and Innovation Research, (formerly Design Recherche, created in 1990). This journal aims to provide a scientific reflection on the act of designing and developing innovative products adapted to the world we live in, assuming a position in the field of engineering design.
In our opinion, the 2000s marked a turning point in innovation research. While the historical disciplines that nurtured innovation continue their work, we are also seeing the emergence of research to develop a new vision of the innovation process (Hatchuel et al. 2001; Tomala et al. 2001), which is becoming collaborative (Boujut 2001; Boujut and Blanco 2003), and to confirm the link between the technological system and innovation (Aït-El-Hadj 2002). It is also a period when the first signs of a blurring of disciplinary boundaries in favor of multidisciplinary work can be detected. For example, we will mention those under the impetus of B. Taravel (Richir et al. 2001), founder in 1999 of Laval Virtual, a show on innovation and new technologies such as virtual reality and augmented reality, which remain a reference to this day. This awareness in engineering sciences, that innovation is a matter of integration and negotiation between different points of view, has raised the importance of creating synergies between social, technological and process to contribute effectively to customer satisfaction.
This is in part why the work carried out by Hatchuel et al. (2001) has had such an impact on the innovation community. The latter suggests that, in order to innovate continuously, the R&D process must have an intermediate phase called the Research–Innovation–Development process, thus allowing innovation to take place in less restricted and less structured situations.
Therefore, since the 2000s, several laboratories based in engineering or science schools for engineers have carried out research to better understand the upstream phases of the innovation process (front end) and in particular the processes of idea generation and selection before moving on to design. As a result, under the heading of inventive design, theories and methods have been investigated on a massive scale, such as C-K (concept-knowledge) (Hatchuel 2001), TRIZ (Cordova-Lopez et al. 2002) and value creation (Yannou et al. 2002). In addition, innovation is becoming collaborative and open, popularizing research around open innovation. In the same way, taking needs and uses into account becomes a key element in improving the ideation phase and the steering of innovation in general (Boly 2004). Finally, these years saw the emergence of a whole stream of research into the metrology of innovation (Morel and Boly 2004).
Although this list is not exhaustive, it does show that a great deal of research has made it