Participative innovation: when innovation becomes everyone's business

In this paper, we develop the concept of participative innovation, conciliating innovation and quality management. Those two views of management are often opposed, the first being associated with emergence and exploration, while the latter is based on control and exploitation. Through interviews with key actors in innovation and quality management, we underline the divergences and convergences of those management approaches. With those actors, we try to find areas where both approaches could be conciliated. The study of emerging practices where every member of the firm is asked to participate in the innovation process gives us an area of intersection. We show that such practices are at the crossroads between innovation and quality management. As a matter of fact, participative innovation meets the key principles of quality management while offering new perspectives for creative innovation. We propose a definition of participative innovation and a method to implement it in companies.