Knowledge Production Modes between Science and Applications 1

Introduction

The essential point is that the incentive to make an invention, like the incentive to produce any other good, is affected by the excess of expected returns over expected costs.

(Schmookler 1962)

This [the invention] represents a new situation, the creation of a technical or organizational novelty, concerning goods, services or devices, whereas innovation represents the whole social and economic process leading to the invention being finally used, or not.

(Alter 2002)

The event undoes the temporality required to invent another time, from which another world, another way of looking at things, is inaugurated.

(Dufourmentelle 2011)

“Eureka, I’ve got it! Eureka”¹ is an interjection that would have been used to celebrate a discovery or invention by Archimedes. It is a transliteration of an exclamation generally attributed to this Greek mathematician and inventor.

These events, snapshots of discovery in the imagination, show that discovery is the basis of a moment of existential tension and questioning, generating emotional behavior. This occurs at an implicit level of consciousness, an infra-conscious level where emotion is felt through immediate bodily involvement, without being grasped by consciousness: experience is lived without any conscious decision thought through gestures, postures, sensations, cries, sounds, homeostatic adjustments, i.e. biochemical regulations that maintain the equilibrium of the person’s inner environment (Benedetti 2021).

But, as Valéry ( ...