The permanent obligation to innovate has led to an explosion in the literature dedicated to innovation, among other things, in the form of recommendations and in recent years, design methods.

It is in this context that the idea of an innovation culture has gradually developed. To follow Murielle Daviès and Stéphanie Buisine, this development would rely on the presence of innovative managers, the presence of innovative teams and individuals, an organizational context conducive to innovation, and multiple and easy links outside the organization. Thus conceived, an organization’s capacity for innovation depends on its ability to attract innovative individuals in environments that facilitate the emergence of innovation. However, the task is far from simple in organizations, which in their quest to improve the productivity of production factors, have historically focused on eliminating uncertainty and have come to standardize everything under the pretext of methods, including product design processes. Aware of this difficulty, major groups now no longer hesitate to be on the lookout for innovative startups and buy them out (indirectly outsourcing their innovation capacity) or to create, outside the traditional research and development function, a function dedicated to innovation and organized according to a more favorable “knowledge crossing” dynamic that is a condition of innovation. Developing an innovation culture cannot be reduced to mastering creativity or ideation techniques such as brainstorming, which only aim to generate many ideas. Above all, innovation implies considering the other, as we have seen in the genesis of Cédric Villani’s theorem.

Is an innovation culture thus conceived sufficient to meet major contemporary challenges? In reading the contributions collected in this book, it seems that the answer is no. “Technical culture” indeed appears to be a central element. However, from the outset, one observation is obvious: the literature dedicated to innovation considers the links between technical culture and innovation inadequately or not at all. Indeed, at best if it is mentioned, “technical culture” is reduced to a set of purely scientific and technological knowledge and know-how from which the innovator will draw in order to innovate. At worst, it is totally ignored and the link with innovation is non-existent.

This situation is not unrelated to the status of technology in our society. Indeed, we are the heirs of the Greek tradition in which technology was not an object of knowledge, [SIG 94] which explains the extremely late advent of a history and philosophy of technology. This situation is all the more paradoxical because innovation is, as Bruno Jacomy [JAC 11] pointed out, constitutive of our humanity and because, as the examples of digital technology, dynamite, or Villani’s theorem show, technical culture is a breeding ground for innovation.

As we have demonstrated, technical culture cannot be reduced to knowledge of the structure and functioning of a certain artifact. It is also all the knowledge developed and mobilized to use said artifact. It is what makes it possible to understand the social depth of use and to extract meaning for the user. However, the understanding and appropriation of the meaning of the object for the user depends on his or her capacity to diffuse himself or herself in society, the non-understanding of the meaning leading conversely to the creation of objects that technically work but ultimately find themselves “out of use” [SCA 92]. Technical culture is also composed of a set of symbolic, sensitive, implicit knowledge that surrounds artifacts, as we saw in Fanny Parise’s chapter. Technical culture is what makes it possible to access the meaning of the artifact, to place it in a history, a genealogy, in other words, to perceive its general coherence in society.

However, it should be pointed out that emphasizing the meaning of the object does not lead to giving it an immutable character. On the contrary, it allows us to emancipate ourselves from an innovation culture reduced to a set of recipes and/or innovative design methods that are completely impervious to the question of the meaning of the object for the user and society. Design thinking as a strategy for innovation seems like an interesting approach. By placing the human being at the heart of the design process, design thinking invites us not to think of innovation only as a technical result, but, on the contrary, to consider it as a process that fits into a social and human environment. The observation and interviews of users, the development of a capacity for empathy among designers are methodologies from the humanities and social sciences that allow us to question the meaning of what has been observed or said. However, the question of meaning here is relegated to that of meaning for the user and does not invite the designer to question what innovation can introduce as social and societal upheavals. As the philosopher Michel Puech emphasizes, if technology is neither good nor bad, it is not neutral either because it induces change [PUE 08]. Hence, if in the long run, we want to ensure that the innovations produced make it possible to respond to the major contemporary issues with which we are confronted today, it becomes urgent to think about the meaning of these innovations for society as well.

As such, this book argues for the recognition of technical culture in our society. This technical culture would make it possible to prevent technology from being isolated from the social representations that make it emerge, adopt it and make it evolve. Essentially, if technical culture is struggling to develop, make sense, and emancipate itself from scientific culture, in our opinion, this comes from the fact that there is still an antagonism between technology as a product (a concrete object or even the results of calculations) and technology as the result of a design process that incorporates and intertwines the state of knowledge with social and political aims or with economic or legal constraints. In other words, choosing a technical culture to innovate means meeting two challenges. The first challenge is to accept the idea that technology is made up of human and social factors, of history, imagination and representations; it is made up of choices that themselves provide sense/meaning to innovation. The second challenge is to consider that if this technical culture allows us to innovate with consciousness, giving us the means to respond to our vast contemporary challenges.

Chapter written by Marianne CHOUTEAU, Joëlle FOREST and Céline NGUYEN