Creative rationality and innovation

Over the last 15 years, financial assistance given to innovation by public authorities, estimated today at ten billion euros, has in fact doubled in France. This assistance is extended to serve a national ambition whose aim, on the one hand, to revive the economy and get back to the path leading to prosperity in a context marked by strong competitivness and, on the other hand, a way of meeting the major challenges of our contemporary world (climate change, increasing scarcity of resources, health issues or the aging of the population). Unfortunately, we must mention that the multiplication of mechanisms (we have apparently gone from around 30 assistance mechanisms in the 2000's to 62 today) is not producing the expected results. Then the question that comes up is: what should be done to go beyond the stage of demanding innovation1 and garner an effective capability to innovate? The author defend the thesis according to which innovation has to be thought about differently. More precisely, she underlines that if, in 2014, 70.2% of the allocated state assistance related to the growth of private R & D capabilities, it is because the conception of public policy in France is based on the linear innovation model inherited from J. Schumpeter. Having discussed the limits of such a model, she underlines the importance to consider innovation from its central process, namely the design process. Then it is possible to consider other possible means of action. Adopting an artificialist perspective, this book focuses on the creative rationality. This last one is the ability to bring together apparently distinct worlds, to find a link where there was none used by innovator like Johannes Gutenberg (the inventor of he printing press) or Bertrand Piccard (the father of the solar impulse project). Creative rationality is a form of thought that invites to knowledge crossing and leads to an adventurous transgression because the combination of knowledge belonging to different universes lead us away from the established norms and paradigms as it can be observe from numerous examples. This book ends with raising the question of the extent to which the education system favors the deployment of creative rationality. After having caution against the risk of a harmful confusion between innovation and entrepreneurship and following the conclusion of an abundant litterature, this book explains how our education system harms the knowledge crossing and kills creativity to use the wording of sir Ken Robinson. Then the author strives towards the rehabilitation of creativity rationality in the training of engineers. Such a rehabilitation leads to the implementation of a "pedagogy of adventure". It involves the indiscipline of students and teachings. Such a pedagogy compels us to devise Human and Social Sciences that are not imported as such from universities, but become meaningful in engineering schools. Along the way this book will dispel a number of myths surrounding innovation.