Introduction
“Every civilization” writes Braudel “imports and exports aspects of its culture. These may include the lost-wax process for casting, the compass, gunpowder, the technique for tempering steel, a complete or fragmentary philosophical system, a cult, a religion or the song about Marlborough that went the rounds of Europe in the eighteenth century: Goethe heard it in the streets of Verona in 1786…” (p. 14). He continues on to say that “civilizations continually borrow from their neighbors, even if they ‘reinterpret’ and assimilate what they have adopted. At first sight, indeed, every civilization looks rather like a railway goods yard, constantly receiving and dispatching miscellaneous deliveries” (p. 29) (Braudel [BRA 93]).
Innovation today is at the heart of business strategy: it is associated with adaptation, change, rebirth, recovery, competitiveness and growth. It is embellished with qualifying adjectives intended to make it even more original: innovation today is disruptive (Christensen [CHR 97]), open (Chesbrough [CHE 03]), frugal (Radjou et al. [RAD 12]), reversed (Govindarajan and Trimble [GOV 12]), fractal (Midler et al. [MID 17]), etc. Technological, organizational and commercial innovation is thus an inevitable trajectory, which can even be considered, for both small and large companies alike, as an injunction carrying with it the penalty of going under in the face of the continuous and globalized tide of competition. But how does a company innovate? ...