Systemic Innovation

5From Shared Inventions to Competitive Innovations: Networks and Enterprise Automation Strategies

5.1. Introduction

The notion of automation (coined in the middle of the 20th Century) has never been standardized because it is marked by semantic dimensions such as the opposition between “automation” and “automatization”. It has always been defined with reference to numerous and very different fields ranging from the organization of techniques used by the industry to uncontrolled human actions, from the mechanical copying of certain human actions to the use of computers or the autonomous operation of new machines linked together in workshops or all-powerful production lines. Because of these facts, approaches to automation have often generated catalogued and compartmentalized debates between technical approaches or global reflections on the links that may exist between machines, work and employment. These debates have thus come up against the need to identify the footprints that automation will leave in society. The questions raised were those of the development of robots¹, then those of autonomous machines (Numerically Controlled Machine Tools, NCMTs) and those of Computer-Aided Manufacturing (CAM), then DNC (Direct Numerical Control).

But these debates very quickly came up against the impossibility of deducing macroeconomic effects on both production and employment and the roles of workers in these increasingly complex and autonomous technical systems. Thus, the debates then ...