Contenu du sommaire : Techno-Scientific Culture and Innovation

Human embryonic stem cells (h
ESC) are the subject of research that requires destroying the embryo. The result is a tension between the logic of development of innovations and ethical constraints. This article seeks to understand this dynamic of innovation and its non-availability in France, focusing on political science. After understanding the development model of innovation and the concept of political science, the analysis focuses on the establishment of a normative ethical barrier against research on hESCs. This establishes a principle ‘prohibited with derogation to be seen', full of ambiguity. The tension generated by this principle led the State to implement a low-key policy: limited, hidden and delegated. Faced with this tension, scientists are trying to develop workarounds, both politically and at scientific level, to continue the innovative dynamic.JEL Codes: O38, O30

Herbert Hoover occupied two important roles prior to his presidency. At the Food Administration during World War I, Hoover learned the importance of eliminating waste, and establishing efficient delivery systems across firms and industries. As Secretary of Commerce he applied those principles in an attempt to improve living standards through the standardization of living. He charged the Bureau of Standards with creating (1) uniform specifications for purchases, (2) simplification to eliminate ‘unnecessary' variation and (3) standards of quality for thousands of industrial products. He saw this as a moral endeavor in which engineers would create a third way between capital and labor. What Hoover failed to notice was that newly created standards promoted dominance by large corporations. Indeed, it helped to pave the way for the audit society in which we currently live and – despite its innovativeness as an approach – limited innovations to those proposed by management.JEL Codes: N00, N12

Over the last two decades, a new kind of learning programme to promote innovation and ‘individual creativity' has seemed to flourish at the global level in numerous universities, engineering and business schools within industrial and emergent countries. If some are really well known, such as the Stanford D. School, many have been created within old institutions. In France, the empirical field of the article, one can count more than 20 innovation/design schools. These ‘innovation' training courses are based on participative pedagogical approaches, often mainly related to ‘design thinking' methods, linked to new technologies, multidisciplinary projects and prototyping activities. The article aims to consider design or innovation schools in France as a result of the complex interaction between the historical roots of French higher technical education and new education pathways arising from the transfer of an international standardised model that began in Stanford or the U.S.JEL Codes: I21, 032, 039, M13

In this paper we take up the call to consider research and innovation to address major contemporary societal challenges, and the need to design innovation policies that go beyond the traditional competitiveness model. We conduct a broad review of the literature to analyse the diversity of innovation models. Although the linear model of innovation remains dominant, we identify three alternative models: users' innovation, distributed innovation, and social innovation. We show that the models of innovation are related to different moral economies, and we discuss their ability to deal with the directionality of innovation. We also show that the current ‘democratisation of innovation' (strongly related to these alternative models) does not necessarily allow societal challenges to be addressed. This analysis leads us to point out two issues. First, the need to make more space for alternative models, and second the need to better understand processes of generalisation through which local innovation acquires the capacity to reach wider users.JEL Codes: O31

Science shops are science-society interfaces that follow a bottom-up approach. They work on the translation of social-based research demands in terms of scientific questions. They support participatory research between Civil Society Organizations, academic research groups and students. The European Commission recognizes science shops as Responsible Research and Innovation tools. They are not widely known in France and southern Europe. We investigate their potentialities in terms of social innovation and co-building research analysis. We describe the co-creation process that we used for the design of our science shop in the North of France. This is based on a scenario-workshop engaging all stakeholders concerned by a science shop. Our science shop is now implemented in the “Community of Universities and Higher Education Institutions Lille-North of France”. We provide a first typology of social demands. This experiment starts with two pilot projects, benefits from the support of motivated stakeholders, and deserves to be shared widely.JEL Codes: I23, I25, I28, O32, O35

The fragility of the independence of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) is underlined by demonstrating the inadequacy of the parameters which are intended to protect it. Secondly, the focus is placed on transparency, presented by the safety authority as an acquired value. This transparency is in fact very limited. But, in particular, the “provision of information” is not a sufficient condition of transparency. Finally, by using the illustrative case of the mine tailings census (Borloo circular, 2009), it is assumed that the economic logic strongly limits the conditions of production of technical knowledge for information purposes.JEL Codes: O30, K32, L16

This paper aims to assess the contribution, role, and impacts of the Science-Based Research and Innovation Program (ISRIP) on farmers' transition to organic production in the Camargue. Focusing on how, and to what extent, research actors have contributed to the innovation pathway, we applied a methods-mix. The Participatory Impact Pathway Analysis (PIPA) was used to uncover complex mechanisms along the innovation process; the Outcome Harvesting method to adapt PIPA to the requirements of an ex-post evaluation, and the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to emphasize actors' relationships in relation to the development process. We demonstrate that the research has contributed to change by developing co-learning interactions with farmers, although this was not critical to the success of the innovation. Rather, we highlight that agricultural policies, economic factors, testing conducted independently by farmers, and the institutional framework, are the most important and influential factors.JEL Codes: O32

The concept of technical democracy is both obvious and perplexing: with technology so often appearing to be a natural extension of science, why should citizens have any say in the matter? And yet how could we imagine or accept that technical systems, which have such an impact on individual and collective choices, could escape the deliberations of civic opinion and decision-making? Citizens must be able to acquire the skills of democratic expertise to then be able to exercise them when strategic decisions are being taken. If we are to move towards this objective, the stakes are very high. Even if a movement is initiated that aims to construct a fairer, more civic and more democratic society, the appropriation of technical issues in both education and the workplace is confronted with multiple types of inertia.JEL Codes: O33, O30, O25