Training Engineers for Innovation

2 Responding to an Event: Innovation of the Contemporary Engineer?

Contemporary capitalism is characterized by the emergence or accentuation of new sources and forms of innovation. We consider innovation, in a very general and preliminary way, as a dynamic significantly transforming the value created via the use of a technical device, whether this device targets end users (“product” innovations) or concerns the organization of labor and production practices (organizational and managerial innovations), or even institutions [LE 06].

However, in contemporary capitalism, innovation seems to have been initiated and developed starting from new “sources”. Many works have tried to shed light on the question of innovation sources to further enlighten the innovative process, which is central to the competitiveness of contemporary organizations [CHE 03, CHR 97, DRU 85]. Innovation may arise from localized initiatives of actors and may emerge through diffuse and random events, which may be a result of incentives or, more fundamentally, from unexpected events, which may be individual or collective. The situations or contexts conducive to the emergence of innovations are extremely heterogeneous. In this chapter, we will attempt to reformulate the process of innovation based on the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, involving uncertainty, instability and unpredictability. This link between uncertainty and innovation has already been problematized [ALT 93]; it shows that innovation today ...