December 2015, “Environmental innovation as a solution for economic impasses” by Romain DEBREF*

At this end of the year, governments, companies and stakeholders will participate in the Conference 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris. The goal of this event is to reach new agreements to fight climate change. There discussions will pay a special attention to innovations during the Sustainable Innovation Forum 2015. Indeed, new families of innovations appear in order to secure the transition towards sustainable development. It is the case of environmental innovation, or eco-innovation, which aimed to provide better interaction between the technosphere and the biosphere. Yet this enthusiasm should be moderated in regard to the last fourth decades of debate in economics.

In the wake of the 1970s, the members of the Club of Rome worked with Dennis Meadows’ team (1972) to launch the “Limits of Growth” movement. The economists of innovation from the University of Sussex, as Christopher Freeman and Keith Pavitt, overthrew the debate with their book entitled “Thinking about the future: a critique of The limits to growth” written in 1974. They argured that the debate of “Growth against Degrowth” was outdated and the focus should be made on innovation. At the same time, various original proposals occurred. On the one hand, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1971; 1984) integrated at the heart of his bioeconomic program the principle of “promethean technologies” from a degrowth perspective. On the other hand, the French research team CIRED** led by Ignacy Sachs proposed various solutions for modifying the existing modes of production from an “ecodevelopment” perspective. Finally, these contributions expose that environmental innovations are the solution to redign the economic system.

Nowadays, despite the popularity of sustainable development, research on the role played by environmental innovation in the transition shows a controversial doctrine. The contribution of ecological economics, evolutionary economics and industrial economics are not still sufficient to frame its boundaries due to its systemic dimensions. It is the case of René Kemp who questions the relevance of “sustainable technologies”. It is also the case of authors who analyse the concept of rebound effect inspired by the postulate of William Stanley Jevons and Khazzom-Brookes’ in the 1980s. Despite of the weakness, private sector, including industries, are taking over these concepts in favor of a transition towards “green growth” without radical change. This tendence could be clearly observed during the last United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio + 20) in 2012 according to Franck-Dominique Vivien and Michel Damian. Finally, considering environmental innovations only as a deus ex machina is not enough to resolve the economic impasses. Due to the complexity of the challenge, they must come with the influence of institutions and political economics.

* Maître de conférences en Sciences économiques, laboratoire REGARDS, EA 6292, Université de Reims-Champagne-Ardenne
** Le Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement

November 2015, “Industrial short supply chains, innovation and integrated territorial development” by Fedoua KASMI*

Historically, short supply chains have emerged in France before the First World War, but have gradually declined during the twentieth century with urban sprawl, the division of labor, transport development and internationalization of markets. Nevertheless they have been redeveloped since the early 2000s in various innovative forms and are now the subject of several studies (including INRA, Institut CDC pour la recherche…). The concept of short supply chains was first applied in the context of Agriculture and Food (“short food supply chains”) to express the proximity between the producer and the consumer, but it can be associated with other objects based on the optimization of the use of local resources, including: industrial ecology, circular economy, collaborative economy, recycling, energy, eco-industries, transport, innovation, financial circuits, heritage restoration, etc.

Short supply chains are based on a systemic and integrated vision of territorial development. Their functioning relies mainly on three dimensions of proximity that are the source of agglomeration effects (cost savings, common infrastructures, knowledge sharing, etc.): a geographic dimension that refers to a spatial distance, an organizational dimension that refers to the exchange capacity between actors and a cognitive dimension that refers to the collective learning capacity. In this sense, short supply chains can be generators of innovations on the territory and contribute to its revitalization.

Innovations generated by short supply chains approaches are not only technical, but also organizational and social. They are based on the combination of local resources and can be a dynamic tool for creating new products, services or processes; maintenance and creation of new sectors and activities in the territory (new companies attracted by the positive externalities realized); organization of new networks (new connections between businesses and communities); social and professional reintegration and creating synergies between territories. They thereby foster the pooling of resources and their complementary capacities. The development of short supply chains requires indeed articulation of territorial scales (local, regional, national, or even international).

But, the development of short supply chains faces several obstacles: relational barriers due to the lack of information and communication; financial barriers due to the amortization of investments in the long term and significant financing needs; economic obstacles related to the presence of additional costs mainly upstream of the process and barriers in terms of competence and qualification needs.

The governance of projects in short supply chains can play an important role in their development, but also in reducing these barriers. It must allow the interaction of different actors. On one hand, public institutions can assist economic actors in the long term, by implementing supporting programs for the development of integrated approaches by short supply chains. On the other hand, private actors can develop links between them and establish regular exchanges in order to manage projects in short supply chains, thereby contributing to an integrated territorial development.

* Clersé, ULCO, Research Network on Innovation

October 2015, “Entrepreneurial creativity”, by Thierry Burger-Helmchen*

To make a good entrepreneur:
take the same quantity of innovation and creativity,
add a small amount of audacity,
a touch of leardership,
a great amount of courage,
mix the whole.
Can be consumed during the whole year.

Creativity and innovation are mentioned as ingredients of entrepreneurship since the works of Schumpeter. Before these works the entrepreneur was depicted as an investor, somebody who takes chances, who merges contradictions. Today, to say that an entrepreneur is a creative is almost a commonplace.

Since Schumpeter many researchers tried to identify the specific relations between creativity and entrepreneurship. The entrepreneurs are creators, but this creation is not necessarily ex nihilo, it can come from an innovating recombination of preexistent resources. The creativity of the entrepreneurs is function of the particular circumstances in which he evolves and of his personality. In the creative mind, intuition, experience, environmental constraints are merged together.

Rarely the launch of a new venture is endowed with an abundance of resources; scarcity would better describe the situation. Therefore, the entrepreneurial situation is characterized by challenges and constrains, limited credibility to convince the bankers, an unknown new product or service and no systems or organizational routines to manage the many activities necessary in the new company. The entrepreneurial situation is thus characterized by a series of tensions and of paradoxes.

Paradoxically, the entrepreneur must concentrate on what is critical, without neglecting all the rest.

Paradoxically, he must combine creativity and familiarity; he must be creative to attract attention and he must use characteristics of the old products and services to prevent rejection.

Paradoxically, the entrepreneur must be able to mix divergent and convergent processes: divergent to generate a new idea, convergent to successfully implement the idea collectively.

Thus, the entrepreneurs have to live with paradoxes in terms of internal and external processes. Therefore it is not astonishing that they must be creative in almost everything they do. Their capacity of innovation is not limited to the product, or the production process, or the comprehension of the market, neither with the presentation of the offer and the organization of the industry, like Schumpeter proposed in the beginning. Their creative capacity covers other related fields such as the staff management, the organization of the company, its culture, the research and the development…

The creative process of the entrepreneur depends mainly on his past experiences; they are the main source of new knowledge. The entrepreneurial creativity rises from a process in four stages: the past experience, the reflection, the conceptualization and the future experimentation.

The experience of work in a precise field is an important stimulus for the entrepreneur because it enables him to identify the market opportunities than he can exploit according to its own capacities and current resources. Thus, the entrepreneurial creativity must be regarded as resulting from the interaction from knowledge deriving from past experience, competences of the individual, and his perception of the future changes of the environment.

There is a sharp debate on entrepreneurial idea generation, on the identification of the business opportunities, is it a conscious process or not? Kirzner (1979) tried to describe this process, for him entrepreneurial alertness consists in the capacity to notice, without specific research efforts, the possibilities that have been neglected before. This description implies that the process is unconscious. Other research observed that the identification of opportunities by the entrepreneurs is based on their intuition rather than formal analysis. In the two approaches the entrepreneurs have only partial influence on opportunity identification process. Many works showed that creative entrepreneurs tend to make important decisions on the basis of their intuition, their instinct rather than based on rational scientific analysis. In other words, they count more on their “intuitions” supported by their perception of the global environment that on conclusions supported by analytical data. This would imply that entrepreneurial decision making comes more from the “right side of the brain”, which is the source of creative ideas.

However, even if most of the entrepreneurial creativity occurs effortlessly, the formal techniques of creativity that help individuals to generate business ideas have some utility. They are particularly useful on the people who block the creative ideas within an organization.

The special issues of Innovations and of the Journal of Innovation Economics and Management gather several works on the entrepreneurial creativity, how they emerge and evolve in different environments, what foster or discourage the development of the creative ideas.

* BETA-CNRS, Faculté des Sciences Economiques et de gestion, Université de Strasbourg

September 2015, “Towards an ethical perspective in information systems engineering”, by Maryse Salles*

Information systems (IS) are an essential component of corporate life, of which they structure actions and assist (or guide) decision making. Due to this central role, the “neutrality” of these systems must be questioned.

Information systems are systems that formalize representations. The IS of an organization can therefore be assimilated to its language, i.e. an ability to account for the “real” in a form that can be shared by a community of players. Through this language, IS structure the way an organization’s players operate and as such have a normative character. As shown by the sociology of management, IS organize work, assign and prescribe tasks, monitor their performance, while supporting an asymmetry between the various stakeholders of the company.

But beyond this, through the norms and the values they express, information systems have an instituting or performative character. What is defined in/by the information system automatically acquires a status of “reality” and enables and even systematically brings about decision making and action. For example, in enterprises, the very limited sets of indicators used to represent the operation of the whole organization brings about decisions and actions aimed exclusively at improving these indicators. In view of these performative effects, we must question the role of IS in decision making, through decision support systems (DSS).

The use of the latter generates indeed several types of risk: data or processing errors, the risk of confusing the real and its digital representation, the risk of feedback which the performativity of these systems involves and the risk of the loss of diversity in the way problems being asked in organizations are tackled. The biggest danger, which is a result of the aforementioned risks, is that of limiting organizations’ ability to innovate, as innovation requires new ideas about the organization, its environment and the organization’s connection with the latter to be developed. Inscribing in IT system and DSSs a unique world view, which is highly restrictive yet undebated (as it is for the most part implicit), also poses the problem of the democracy in the life of organizations.

The Big Data, in an uncontrolled quest for predictive and even prescriptive decision support (which would replace the decision-maker), are the cause of disturbing problems at the epistemological and democratic levels. A general and worrying picture is being drawn in the discourse of the numerous promoters of Big Data: the refusal of the irreducible diversity of the real, the denial of the necessary complexity of human thought and the devaluation of experience as a primary source of knowledge.

Faced with the immense potential offered by authentic support, but also with the real risk of technology that would occultly guide human actions and decisions, it seems absolutely vital to question the way IS and DSSs are built. Their designers, all the stakeholders involved, have a responsibility with regards to how IS are used and to the consequences of any decisions made with their support.

But calling on this responsibility can only be legitimate if it is assisted and equipped by means of a real engineering of responsibility. Computer ethics, very neglected by IT professionals, provides some (partial) tools, but research on this topic should be widely intensified in a multidisciplinary approach. The aim is to produce methodological tools for designing SI that incorporate a plurality of world views. In the same vein, computer science training should, in our opinion, include teaching about computer ethics (which is broadly absent from IT courses), and a reflection on the influences the DSS can have on the decision process and its results.

* IRIT/SIG UT1-C, Maryse.Salles@ut-capitole.fr

August 2015, “Economic development and innovation capability in globalization”, by Vanessa CASADELLA*

Globalization has changed the orientation of the economic policies and contributed to reconsider their role in economic development. If the system of world governance raises problems of efficiency, it nevertheless mobilized many actors in orientating decision-making. The failure of the post-Bretton Woods political dirigisme has engendered other interventionist and liberal periods that have also resulted in failure. Pro-cyclic policies, as mentioned in the “Washington Consensus” worsened the situation of developing countries. It is then the concept of “good governance” which emerges after the Asian crisis at the end of 1990s as a remedy of the good performance of markets. It recommends the development of institutions and infrastructures while respecting new environmental constraints and an fair distribution of resources. But this “good governance” is awkwardly apprehended and does not provide solution to the real problems related to public policies (innovation policies, industrial choices, etc.).

Which model should be conceived to create sustainable economic growth? Perhaps it would be necessary to listen to Galbraith’s precepts based on a simple principle: the organization of a basic training and education system. But beyond this, economic development policy presumes the definition of strategic objectives related to the promotion of innovation capabilities, which goes hand in hand with the construction of innovation systems based on competencies, valorization of scientific and technical knowledge and in particular through human capital.

An innovation system describes the relations between scientific, technological and industrial institutions that are constituted by various types of financial and informational flows. An innovation system in developing countries can only emerge through a suitable institutional framework. The question of development coupled with innovation is important because both interact positively. The reduction of poverty is related to the countries’ ability to control the creation and diffusion of knowledge. But innovation presumes that citizens are free and sufficiently enlightened to produce knowledge. However in developing countries, the unequal treatment of minorities, the weaknesses the innovation system or the bad local governance (corruption, populism) automatically limits the learning capabilities of the society.

But the reality of developing countries could not be satisfied with a form of ambient “South-pessimism”. These countries have uneasily exploitable wealth but which are at the base of a virtuous innovation process. Only with the implementation of real innovation policies. And it is precisely the political decision failures that are blocking developing countries: brain drain, lack of capabilities, ignorance of human potentials and traditional knowledge, low consideration of local informal small firms, etc. However the efficiency of these policies seems strategic in the current world competitiveness. Based on these aspects, the RNI Summer School 2015 in the Creil University Institute of Technology will present various topics between the construction of innovation policies, the structuring of innovation systems of the South and the setting of indicators for the evaluation of innovation policy.

* CRIISEA, University Picardie Jules Verne Amiens

July 2015, “Information and Knowledge in Patents”, by Pierre SAULAIS*

For an industrial or academic organization, analyzing patent portfolios becomes in the past years more and more important. But are we really today in a position to easily and reliably determine and structure their informative content?

We can find an abundant literature about the automatic analysis of information enclosed in patent portfolios, especially in the US where USPTO (United States Patent Trademark Office) imposes editing standards facilitating such an analysis. Many indicators of technological and economic value appeared by combination of classes and citations, for instance. This kind of analysis is focused on a global statistical approach, likely to be polluted by many deviations: class allocation deviation (size of taxonomy, overlap), language deviation (abstract only translated in English, …), cognitive deviations (patent files are not written by the inventors but by Industrial Property office clerks not skilled in inventive activity analysis and mainly concerned by novelty), semantic deviations (approximations in lexical use, …), statistical application deviations (extrapolation with small confidence interval, …), … As its perimeter is restricted to information level without any penetration of its inventive knowledge, automatic analysis is limited to the identification of trends operated in comparative mode, which still opens and keeps a very large spectrum of strategic applications (competitor watch, …).

Our experience suggests that, beyond the characterization of the invention’s mechanism and results, lies, at an upper level of non-explicit abstraction, the mental process leading from a technical problem, unsolved by the expert within the present state of the art knowledge, to the definition of specific innovative works, which brought not only a technical solution to the technical problem but also a substantial creation of inventive knowledge likely to significantly improve the state of the art of knowledge. The ability of penetrating this inventive knowledge requires the transformation of our point of view about the technical object described in the patent, making it evolve from product to intangible knowledge object. The point is then to shift from the level of information to the level of knowledge and also to contribute to an evolution of the level of knowledge to the level of metacognition (ability to activate structure knowledge and comprehension in a reasoned way, which aims at defining and elaborating creations). This change in point of view is based on the structuration of knowledge, on the creation of a knowledge map and on the projection of inventive knowledge onto this map.

Further to the determination of inventive knowledge, the creation of which is requested to solve the technical problem, the evaluation of innovative capacity included in a patent portfolio cannot be carried out without measuring the deepness (or degree) of inventive activity, which is itself linked to the fertility, to the actability and to the acceptability of inventive knowledge created during the inventive activity.

Next step consists in defining a method evaluation the deepness of inventive activity, method based on the structured analysis of the mental process leading from a technical problem to the creation of inventive knowledge, according its coherency, its teleological aspect, its autonomic or heteronomic dominance.

The valorization of such a formalized inventive activity seems achievable by the association of two specialists. First one is an expert in inventive activity, specialized in knowledge structure and in intellectual inventive corpus, in charge of the extraction of inventive activity. Second one is a innovation project manager, in charge of activating inventive activity within a partnership and of sharing prospective vision within this partnership, inside or outside the organization.

To sum up, our approach is based on a double dynamic, firstly in the domain of knowledge of knowledge with the evolution from information to metacognition and secondly in the knowledge field with the activation of this metacognition.

* Associated researcher at Institut Mines-Télécom

June 2015, “Intellectual Capital and Business Innovation”, by Sophie MIGNON*, Elisabeth WALLISER**

Today, the value of both products and companies is derived, to the extent of 80%, from the intelligence injected into them: we have entered the society of knowledge. The invisible has come to take precedence over the visible. We are clearly experiencing a new scientific and technological revolution on a larger scale than its predecessors. In this emerging “new world”, the intangible has become dominant, for example through the role of information and knowledge circulating in the networks, generating new uses and products on the market, and consequently leading to renewed organisational practices… This new situation is unsettling production and market systems, and calling into question the behaviours of the actors concerned, particularly in firms and their management methods.

It can be argued that the more developed an economy is, the greater its intangible component compared to the strictly tangible component, as regards both production and consumption.

In short, this predominance of the intangible is leading to both new “economic models” and upheaval in existing business models. Therefore, we need to review management and governance methods, as well as the systems for “incorporation” and valuation of the associated assets-flows-performances. It can be considered that analysis of this new intangible economy calls for an entirely new paradigm breaking away from the economic, legal and management analysis framework used in the traditional market economy.

The special issues of Innovations. Revue d’Economie et de Management de l’Innovation and the Journal of Innovation Economics and Management present a collection of research on this question in a cross-disciplinary perspective. The objective is to show the link between innovation and intangibles. While innovation is a key factor in organisations’ competitiveness and durability, it is inevitably accompanied by intangible input and output.

In terms of input, innovation is built on knowledge, skills and dynamic capacities but also on the creativity of the individuals who make up organisations’ human capital. Innovations are rooted in codified knowledge (warehouses, mapping, procedures…) but also on more tacit knowledge sharing through socialisation mechanisms and more informal meetings. Beyond the simple “information capital” and its maintenance over time, we need to look at the formation of the “social capital” between a firm and its suppliers, clients, advisors, experts, etc.

In terms of output, innovation is expressed through brands, reputation, patents, labels, and so on, which enable the organisation to stand out from its competitors. This results in product innovations based on new usages and modes of consumption, managerial innovations related to new ways of organising groups, etc., which require adjustment of the institutional rules (legal, tax, accounting and financial rules).

* Montpellier Recherche en Management, Université de Montpellier
** Groupe de Recherche en Management, Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis

May 2015, “Smart devices revolutionize home automation”, by Morand MULLET*

Internet has installed permanently in our lives. We live in a connected world where it will be impossible to disconnect. Personal computers have taken a prominent place in our homes and smartphones have become an extension of our hand. Our daily life has been radically changed as well as the way we work, consume or communicate. Today, a third Internet revolution “the Internet of Things” is underway and intends to merge the virtual world with the real world.

On the other hand, we have the sector of home automation. Promised to a bright future in common imagination in the 1980s, the technology has never imposed on the general public and has remained confined to top of the range public or handyman. And yet its principles address the problems of our society: more secure living place, more comfort and free time and reduced impact of housing in the environment.

More and more products combining these two worlds appear. One can quote the case of connected thermostats. This new market initiated in 2012 by Nest is invested by dozens of others. For example, the “Nest” solution equips 1% of American homes. Another product is connected to the lighting system. Many companies launch product and the major players such as Philips believe that in the future all bulbs will be connected.

The integration of smart devices to the world of housing will strongly impact the home automation sector. The technologies have become affordable, reliable and capitalize on current trends (self-quantified). The intelligence swerves to interact with the outside world. This development has implications for other future sectors such as artificial intelligence and big data.

The giants of the Internet, the electrical equipment manufacturers, the telecom operators, the manufacturers of appliances or the startups, all invest in the sector and are waging a fierce battle.

Nevertheless, the development of these new technologies raises many questions and will be at the center of many debates. We’ll have to overcome the psychological and cultural barriers to see the democratization of home automation through the connected objects. For example, questions will arise about the data security and their utilization. Consumers will consider these objects as tools of monitoring that will restrict their freedom and an intrusion into their privacy.

* SIDE / Laboratoire de Recherche sur l’Industrie et l’Innovation, Lille-Nord de France

April 2015, “Product innovation in biobased chemistry: A substitute to plastics”, by Manon JUBIEN*

The green chemistry has been defined for the first time in 1998 by Anastas and Warner with 12 principles that aimed to design the synthesis of more environmentally friendly chemicals with less-energy consuming processes. Thus, the green chemistry is a recent discipline that brings in innovations in every fields covered by chemical industry. One of the 12 principles of the green chemistry recommends the use of renewable plant-based resources which characterized the biobased chemistry. So, the biobased chemistry has the same environmental dimension as the green chemistry. Through the development of efficient innovative products, the biobased chemistry takes the economic aspect of the industry into account and can be considered as a substitute to the petrochemical industry.

The petrochemical industry absorbs only 10% of global oil consumption but suffers from a bad reputation due to the industrial disasters in the last forty years. That is why an enthusiasm goes with innovations in the biobased chemistry. The plastic industry is one of the most important chemical fields with applications in diversified sectors like construction, packaging, automotive or electronic. The biobased chemistry has enhanced the development of innovative biobased plastics in the 2000s. Nevertheless, the production of these plastics is still marginal compared to the global plastic production. What conditions can let to the substitutability of plastics by product innovations in the biobased chemistry?

By focusing on the packaging and the biomedical industries, one can work out the motivations for developing biobased plastics. These two sectors are not chosen randomly: the packaging is the first application for plastics and the biomedical is an emerging and promising sector for biobased chemistry innovations. It should be noticed that the main motivation of these two sectors in the biobased products development is the research on biodegradability. Biodegradability can lead to the reduction of plastics wastes on the one hand and to advantages in usage on the other hand. Indeed, the biodegradable plastic can create an efficient packaging to facilitate the waste collection and management meanwhile it can also be used in the design of bioresorbable medical devices.

The substitutability of plastics by biobased product innovations can be determined only after technological reliability analysis based on the characteristics required for the applications studied and the economic feasibility analysis. In the packaging industry, in particular food packaging, the priority is given to the stable plastics which ensure the food preservation. Meanwhile, the treatment of these innovations at the end of their life cycle should also draw special attention as the recycling being the privileged pathway for wastes reduction. In the biomedical sectors, scientists focus on the biological compatibility of innovations and on the best control of degradation time. In both sectors, the substitutability will depend on the production costs of the biobased plastics compared to usual plastics but also on the environmental benefits of these innovations.

* SIDE / Research Unit on Industrie and Innovation, Lille-Nord de France

March 2015, “Innovation Nexus: Entrepreneurial Strategies and Public Policies”, by Fabienne Picard

Building on the papers presented at the Summer School of the Research Network on Innovation (Belfort, August 2013), the last issues of Innovations highlight new questions around innovation. Innovations – Revue d’Economie et de Management de l’Innovation dedicates the volume 46/4 to sustainable innovation policies and Innovations – Journal of Innovation Economics & Management, dedicates the volume 2014/4(16) to innovations nexus – policies and strategies.

Gradually a field of reflection on sustainable innovation seems to be building, considering it sometimes as a specific form of innovation, eco-innovation or environmental innovation, sometimes as an innovation in a specific context that of sustainable development. In these both perspectives, concepts and models of theories of innovation and technical change are revisited.

From the outset, innovation is linked to the ability of actors to build links and to work in an open and multi-scalar environment. In the diversity of contributions to these issues, some ask contemporary public policy innovation and research, analyze the shortcomings and developments, while others focus on business strategies, the ability of firms to appear, to growth and to enter in new markets, to develop new patterns of innovation, to offer renewed business models. It is interesting to note that the reflections use various technological objects as support (smart grids, electric vehicles), analyze different industries (photovoltaic, food, wine, health). These objects are not always directly link to sustainability but traditional industries which have to evolve in order to be adapted to new environmental challenges.

For more information: https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-of-innovation-economics-2015-1.htm

February 2015, “The reinvention of wood as an eco-innovative material”, by Maxime Dulieu*

After over a century of productivism, the society is paying the price. The economics outweights the social welfare and leads to many very serious environmental consequences. Thus, the need to change paradigm is undisputable and the sustainable development seems to offer an interesting solution. Its definitions are numerous, sometimes evasive and often imprecise. But what we must emphasize is that the sustainable development suggests a global change in behavior and aims to redefine the social and environmental issues. The implications are significant, logics hitherto absent from the decision-making processes must be re-integrated. The sustainable development will introduce innovative methods to human activities to face these new challenges.

Among these activities, the building sector is one of the worst polluters, it represents about one-third of the final energetic consumption in the OECD countries. But this latent obsolescence of real estate also means that there is significant room for improvement. Therefore, the building sector embodies one of the most promising sectors in terms of energy saving and welfare improvement. This has now resulted in the introduction of innovative solutions in a brand new framework: green building.

Green building is based on the principle that a building should have a minimal negative impact on its environment (natural, social and economic) throughout its life cycle. Builders must pay close attention to the choice of materials and processes used in construction.

One of the most promising solutions comes from a material that is already well established in construction, the wood. This material can indeed now meet the challenges posed by the specifications of eco-construction. Although it has been generally complementary in construction, wood has reinvented itself and now has the potential to replace almost all conventional construction materials.

Beyond the almost overcome technical challenges, today we build multi-storied wooden buildings around the world (London, Vancouver), the properties displayed by the wood are stunning. Whether environmental, economic, or even social, this material shows a simultaneous efficiency that goes well beyond what could be done until now.

Note that this revival of the material is not accidental but a direct result of important research, notably carried out in North America.

Now we must overcome the psychological and cultural obstacles facing the democratization of this new kind of building.

* SIDE / Laboratoire de Recherche sur l’Industrie et l’Innovation, Lille-Nord de France

January 2015, “Technological systemic as support and stimulation of innovation”, by Smaïl Aït-El-Hadj*

The innovation stream, particularly that of technological innovation, has instigated a series of theoretical contributions devoted to a better understanding and modelling of the technological structure and movement in society. The multiplication of these theoretical contributions is particularly evident mainly during the ’70s to the ‘80s, with the major works of Bertrand Gille, Thomas Hughes, Gilbert Simondon and many others. This particularly significant moment in the progress of the science of technology is not new and finds its roots in a long stream of theories going back to the “Encyclopedie”, taking into account the French “Mécanologie” and the German “Kinematic” of the 19th century.

This body of knowledge has contributed to enlightening the great innovation movement known as the technological shift at the end of the ’70. Different currents have resulted in a universal coverage of the technological field, from micro systems to technology modelling in society at large.

These knowledge assets, focused on systems as scientific objects within the classical rationalist paradigm, have started to benefit from the enrichment of their dynamic modelling capacities with the systemic approach, and its specific epistemological efficiency, and the sciences of complexity.

This theoretical approach, having mainly contributed to the explanatory clarification of the technological structures and analytical models in the recent key elaboration phase, is now becoming an active provider of innovation supports on four axes.

First of all, technological systemic aims at theorizing the innovation movement by identifying its invariants. This allows scientific modelling beyond the elementary technological innovation perceptive or storytelling approaches. Secondly, this modelling creates a predictive capacity with its application within the prospective methodology. Thirdly, technological systemic can provide stakeholders and innovation actors the building blocks of firm innovation strategies as well as public policies for supporting and stimulating innovation.

Finally, technological systemic is capable of bringing enhancement to knowledge understanding and modelling applied to the design process of new products. In so doing, technological systemic combines and enriches design the methodology labelled as system engineering. This combination could bring to the design process an enlightenment and even operational knowledge about the structure and evolution model of the design of each and every specific technical system. The operative forms of these tools can be design patterns, knowledge and databases capitalization frames, and even specific product development simulations.

The technological systemic theoretical apparatus still needs further development to reach its full operational capacity: the development of standards and synthesis of different contributions, the completion of its consolidation under systemic epistemology and methodology, and the elaboration of tools bringing these contributions to innovation.

* Université de Lyon, ITECH

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