Training Engineers for Innovation

3 Innovation within Companies: Changes and Impacts on Our Student Engineer Training Models

3.1. Introduction

The objective of this chapter is to characterize the innovative changes within companies to provide ideas on the required adaptation of training practices in engineering schools. One of the first characteristics of the concept of innovation is its transversality in research: sociology work intersects with those of education sciences, creating an echo within research into management sciences or even economic sciences. These disciplines have innovative approaches that are sometimes different and sometimes contradictory, notably concerning the fields of education and business. Innovation is thus a multidimensional and multidisciplinary phenomenon that occupies a “vast space” that we cannot represent in a consensual way. We have chosen to position innovation at the interaction between different elements at a social, societal, organizational, methodological, technical and managerial level. Our singular approach, as seen previously with innovation design, makes it possible to question the impacts of the evolution of these conceptions of innovation on training and the engineering profession.

From a competitive advantage, innovation has become a necessity, an imperative for companies in order to ensure their sustainable development.

Thus, in order to define conceptions of innovation, we recall two approaches: its aims and its scope in terms of change. Technological innovation ...