Different stages of the positioning of participative innovation (PI) over time. The case of the PI routine at the French National Railway Company (SNCF)

Our research focuses on the SNCF company. With 160,000 workers, SNCF is a bureaucratic structure (Weber, 1971; Mintzberg, 1982; Alter, 1995, 1996) facing the challenge of openness to competition. We analyse the participative innovation routine that has deeply changed since the 1990s, whereas a routine in the literature is considered to be stable (Nelson and Winter, 1982; Cohen et al., 1996). How can the participative innovation routine within SNCF have changed so deeply, and why? We rely on the methodological approach by Barley and Tolbert (1997) to understand the different steps of an organisational routine's transformation through the notion of script. We adopt an interpretativist posture (Girod-Séville and Perret, 1999) to study this participative innovation routine, understood in the sense of Feldman (2000). We show how this articipative innovation routine has changed over the years, and we interpret why. The interest of this research concerns all large companies involved in markets opening to competition as in the example of this company.