Economics, Management and Engineering of Innovation: Trajectories and Prospects for Systemic Innovation
Forum Innovation is an international conference organized by the Research Network on Innovation. The 2025 edition will be an opportunity to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the journal Innovations, Revue d’Economie et de Management de l’Innovation, the first issue of which was published in 1995.
Innovation lies at the heart of the dynamic growth model based on uncertainty, risk and profit. In the current context of economic, political and health crisis that characterizes our modern economies, entrepreneurs, companies, public or private organizations and public institutions are faced with the need to rapidly renew technologies, organizational schemes and modes of production and consumption. Technology, organization, production, consumption – one leading to the other, innovation can only be systemic. As a result, new trajectories are emerging, old ones are changing, new economic and entrepreneurial prospects are opening up, and reshaping activities. The current context is leading us to rethink the performance standards of organizations and economies, which are essentially based on profit, and to take a fresh look at the dynamics and systems of innovation, which include more numerous and more diversified stakeholders.
The guiding principle of the 2025 edition of the Innovation Forum is to understand the systemic nature of innovations and to reflect on their potential for dissemination and application. The emphasis on systemic innovation means that innovation is understood not only as an outcome in the form of new technological products and processes, new organizations and new business methods, but also as a process whose specific features need to be studied: modes of interaction and coordination between players, controversies, objectives and implications on a territorial scale (Uzunidis et al., 2021 a, b).
If the creative spirit is at the root of the design of new products and technologies, new modes and models, or new organizations and activities, the company is the main player in the implementation of collective processes for exploiting knowledge. Systemic innovation is now the result of the organization’s ability to be agile in generating and appropriating knowledge that is useful to its adaptation and development process. The more agile and financially powerful the company, the more porous its boundaries and the greater its capacity to acquire (and exploit) production resources, which inevitably leads to the formation of complex innovation systems.
Systemic innovation arises and spreads from a breakthrough innovation originating in the socio-technical system, which is itself naturally unstable. This innovation is amplified, through the interplay of players, thanks to incremental innovations within and between sectors, but also thanks to subsidiary or related breakthrough innovations, leading to the creation of new combinations of product, process, organizational or commercial innovations, which are also systemic. In turn, systemic innovations (a set of innovations arising from the new combinations made possible by the diffusion/adaptation of the breakthrough innovation), disrupt the socio-technical system, the robustness of which depends on the strength of the routines it generates.
This Forum Innovation 2025 will focus on analyzing the causal relationships between technological change, social change and innovation strategies and policies. Research into the nature of innovation, its role in transforming societies in the face of today’s major challenges (climate and the environment, health, food, military and political conflicts, etc.), its pitfalls and the ways in which it can be used as a tool to achieve sustainable development objectives will be particularly studied.
The conference will present the most recent advances in the fields of economics, management and engineering and the epistemology of innovation, with particular emphasis on the following themes:
- Economic history and history of thought on creativity, innovation and economic systems
- Forms and polymorphism of innovation: agile, digital, disruptive, dual, eco-innovation, inverse, frugal, managerial, minor, major, open, participative, radical, responsible, social, strategic, systemic (…)
- Analysis and management of new economic and organizational models: agility, digitalization, circular economy (…)
- New technologies (artificial intelligence, blockchain), responsible innovation and societal impacts
- Stakeholder strategies (companies, organizations and institutions) to generate innovation
- Sectoral innovation: agriculture, services, industries
- Trans-sectoral innovation and national innovation systems
- Innovation, energies (solar, wind energy, hydrogen…) and sustainable development
- Dual innovation and complex systems
- Internal and collective organization, innovation networks
- Spaces, ecosystems and environments conducive to the emergence of innovations
- Technological trajectories, paradigms and innovation systems
- Economic and spatial impact of innovation, economic cycles
- Failure, responsibility and socio-technical controversies
- Appropriation and protection of innovation (Intellectual property rights) versus collaboration and open innovation
- Modalities and orientations of innovation policies
- Innovation capacities, systems and economic inclusive development
Innovations 1995/1 (n°1), Progrès et ruptures, https://www.editions-harmattan.fr/index.asp?navig=catalogue&obj=numero&no=16575&no_revue=21&razSqlClone=1
Innovations 2020/3 (n°63). La revanche des communs. Science et créativité. https://www.cairn.info/revue-innovations-2020-3.htm
Innovations 2021/3 (n°66), De la créativité à l’innovation. La valeur de l’idée. https://www.cairn.info/revue-innovations-2021-3.htm
Innovations 2023/3 (n°72), Processus dynamiques d’innovations responsables. https://www.cairn.info/revue-innovations-2023-3.htm
Innovations 2024/2 (n°74), Défis majeurs et politiques d’innovation à mission, https://www.cairn.info/revue-innovations-2024-2.htm
Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2021/3 (n°36) From Creativity to Innovation. A Cross-fertilization Process. https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-of-innovation-economics-2021-3.htm
Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2024/1 (n°43), Responsible innovation. Theoretical debates and facts trends, https://www.cairn.info/revue-journal-of-innovation-economics-2024-1.htm
Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2020/2 (n°32). Managerial Innovation and Open innovation strategies
Journal of Innovation Economics & Management 2019/1 (n°28) Agile Innovation
Marché et organisations 2019/3 (n°36) Economie sociale et solidaire. Modèles d’innovation et modes de gouvernance.
Technologie et Innovation, 2022/7, Recherche responsable et responsabilité académique
Uzunidis D., Kasmi F., Adatto L., Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1: Main Themes, Wiley, 2021
Uzunidis D, Kasmi F., Adatto L., Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 2: Special Themes, Wiley, 2021
