ABOUT THE BOOK
In L’Entreprise Créatrice Hélène Mialet uses the tools of the sociologist, the ethnographer, and the ethnomethodologist to study innovation in an applied research laboratory of a major international corporation. Though there have been a number of prominent ethnographic studies of scientific laboratories in recent years, the world of industrial research is still not very well documented.
L’Entreprise Créatrice offers a detailed description of the collective practices constitutive of invention. At the same time, it also presents a picture of how a single research scientist (considered by both his peers, and the institution for which he works, as the pre-eminent expert behind the discovery of ground breaking new techniques) emerges within these collective operations and distinguishes himself through the creative skills he applies in formulating working instruments, organizational structures and human relations.
More specifically, through the emergence of an object considered as new (in this case, a new way of computer modeling oil fluids), Mialet was able to chart the processes by which an innovation came into being. She described how this object modified practices, how it changed the modes of research, how it altered the behavior of actors, and ultimately how it came to redistribute competencies between machines, tools, techniques, colleagues, organizational hierarchies, and the environment. Moreover, as she followed the object as it was used, Mialet could see how the particular competencies associated with its inventor came to be articulated with increasing precision.
This enabled her to show how the mechanisms of acknowledgement, linked partially to the company's criteria of novelty assessment, came to qualify the inventor and his inventions. In this sense, in trying to define the practice of invention, she sought to put into relief the kinds of competencies the individual inventor deploys to invent. At the same time, she also explained how this individual inventor was able to transfer his know-how to his colleagues, and the strategies he used to convince these colleagues, as well as his external partners (universities, industrial companies, research laboratories), that his invention was important. Mialet thus showed both that the invention is distributed throughout this collective process while, at the same time, that it is through this collective process, (this addition of mediations) that the creative individual actually comes into being.
A finalist for the Prix ADVANCIA for the best book published in French on Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 2008
L’Entreprise Créatrice offers a detailed description of the collective practices constitutive of invention. At the same time, it also presents a picture of how a single research scientist (considered by both his peers, and the institution for which he works, as the pre-eminent expert behind the discovery of ground breaking new techniques) emerges within these collective operations and distinguishes himself through the creative skills he applies in formulating working instruments, organizational structures and human relations.
More specifically, through the emergence of an object considered as new (in this case, a new way of computer modeling oil fluids), Mialet was able to chart the processes by which an innovation came into being. She described how this object modified practices, how it changed the modes of research, how it altered the behavior of actors, and ultimately how it came to redistribute competencies between machines, tools, techniques, colleagues, organizational hierarchies, and the environment. Moreover, as she followed the object as it was used, Mialet could see how the particular competencies associated with its inventor came to be articulated with increasing precision.
This enabled her to show how the mechanisms of acknowledgement, linked partially to the company's criteria of novelty assessment, came to qualify the inventor and his inventions. In this sense, in trying to define the practice of invention, she sought to put into relief the kinds of competencies the individual inventor deploys to invent. At the same time, she also explained how this individual inventor was able to transfer his know-how to his colleagues, and the strategies he used to convince these colleagues, as well as his external partners (universities, industrial companies, research laboratories), that his invention was important. Mialet thus showed both that the invention is distributed throughout this collective process while, at the same time, that it is through this collective process, (this addition of mediations) that the creative individual actually comes into being.
A finalist for the Prix ADVANCIA for the best book published in French on Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 2008