Émile Gayoso: New forms of innovation and their impact on organisations: Findings and outlook

In the context of a globalised, highly competitive economy that increasingly relies on companies’ ability to manage information that is both volatile and crucial, the relationships between companies and their environment are expanding and fundamentally reshaping innovation processes. As a new manifestation of the dialectical complementarity between innovation and organisation, companies’ openness to increasingly complex external ecosystems makes the ability to integrate the talents of dispersed individuals and organisations a crucial skill for managers and firms.

Online user communities, which are integrated into the innovation processes of certain large companies, provide a unique example of organisations opening up to their ecosystem. Exploring the variety of structures, actors, resources and skills deployed by companies in managing these communities will be one of the main focuses of our research. In particular, we will focus on the role of the user community facilitator who, as a figure situated at the organisation’s periphery, must act as a translator between the diverse representational systems of users and those of the company. We will seek to understand how this translation takes place and how users’ experiences and expertise are integrated into innovative offerings currently being designed.

From the users’ perspective, the aim of this thesis is to gain a better understanding of both the ways in which users engage with these co-innovation platforms and the reasons behind their involvement. Given that an increasing number of user-centred co-innovation sites offer rewards (such as gift vouchers, concert tickets, etc.), the aim will be to determine whether individuals’ engagement in these schemes is more a matter of leisure activities, or, on the contrary, a complement to their professional activities; the Manichean opposition between these two categories is, of course, intended to be transcended, perhaps through the definition of an intermediate category between leisure time and working time, of which the social web (Web 2.0) would be the indicator