Thesis supervisor
: Patrice Flichy
Innovating innovation
. This is the idea behind open innovation, which, since its formalization in management sciences, has been declared the "new imperative for creating and benefiting from technologies." Presented as a new management paradigm, this concept nevertheless covers a wide variety of definitions and realities depending on the actors who are increasingly seeking to implement its organizational methods. This thesis focuses specifically on this search for new models that are constructed neither within companies nor solely by innovation collectives, but through places and mechanisms for face-to-face cooperation that are emerging in the digital world to act in between, as spaces that are separate from the latter. It aims to show that this ongoing search, far from being random, is organized beyond a collection of management tools, through modes of action and representation that are formed within these places, in a situated manner, in the form of new practical and relational conventions of cooperative work.
Taking an empirical approach, this thesis offers an ethnographic immersion into the experience of "La Cantine," the first coworking space to establish itself as the hub of digital innovation in Paris, managed by a business association, Silicon Sentier. Initiated in 2010 as an observational study
, the research was conducted between 2011 and 2014 on three fronts: the space itself, open innovation mechanisms, and the work of intermediation carried out at the intersection of heterogeneous worlds. Rather than considering open innovation as a given, the description allows us to follow how a particular conception emerges in the trajectory of the space's institutionalization (Part 1), through its material dimension and hybrid framing modes (Part 2), as well as in the intermediation work carried out by its permanent staff (Part 3). The thesis draws on a variety of theoretical frameworks to analyze each of these aspects: an ecological approach to social worlds, a situationist approach to frameworks and framing, and, finally, an interactionist approach to cooperative work. By articulating these approaches, it finally proposes a conclusive study that broadens the scope of the reflection developed within La Cantine beyond its walls, when open innovation mechanisms spread throughout the world of organizations. This broadening allows us to characterize these "border mechanisms" by a permanent movement of framing and overflow, of common structure and interpretative and organizational flexibility, of formalization and destabilization through which the principles of cooperation originating in the digital worlds are not only translated into the order of interactions, but also institutionalized in increasingly distant worlds.
Keywords
: open innovation, intermediary, heterogeneous worlds, situated cooperation, hybrid space, frontier device
Defense on Thursday, May 9, 2019
Doctorate
: Sociology
Year of thesis registration
: 2010
Doctoral school
: OMI – Organization, Markets, Institutions
Thesis jury
Valérie BEAUDOUIN, Director of Studies at Télécom ParisTech (Rapporteur)
Alexandre MALLARD, Director of Research at Mines ParisTech (Rapporteur)
Dominique CARDON, Professor at Sciences Po’ Paris (Examiner)
Franck COCHOY, Professor at the University of Toulouse II (Examiner)
Alexandre MATHIEU-FRITZ, Professor at the University of Paris-Est (Examiner)
Patrice FLICHY, Professor Emeritus at the University of Paris-Est (Director)