Public crowdsourcing and territorial innovation: the case of a rural living lab[Crowdsourcing public et innovation territoriale : le cas d’un living lab rural]

Our society rests upon a knowledge-based economy thus the competitiveness of an organization is defined by its ability to innovate. This relies on its own capability including intrapreneurship, innovative hubs, places for open innovation, internal firm challenges… This innovation department tends to take over in companies, already emphasizing its concept of a cross sector approach and its importance in the continued existence of the company. The openness between public and private sectors is needed in order to capture the innovation from the very beginning. The private organization, that is to say the company, understood well that its existence and its competitiveness depend on its ability to create a network where the actors depend on each other. More and more companies call on ‘the crowd' to innovate through the ‘crowdsourcing' (Howe, 2008). Based on the principle that anyone is an expert in something, the call to a huge number of actors allows the capture of new ideas and innovation. For public organizations, calls for projects, consulting agencies and sourcing agencies working on specific fields set up networks and relationships with all the project shareholders even when they are not laureates, in order to catch the new changes and trends at a local level. On their part, the territorial actors get organized to enforce their ideas and influence public policies. It is therefore possible to consider, for public organizations, as for private organizations to call on the crowd in the form of ‘citizensourcing' (Lukensmeyer and Torres, 2008). Our main question deals with the crowdsourcing phenomenon created by public organizations and the way it contributes to local innovation. What shape does it take? Is it the bearer of a balanced relationship between all the actors? We will focus on the innovation in the public sector, the operating actors and networks and then on the balance of the relationship between all the partners and its determining factors. Finally we will highlight the innovative structure that is the LL. Through the case study of a citizen LL from Seine et Marne, Brie'Nov, we will study the emerging forms of local innovation including communities, companies and citizens. We will bring to light that the mutual influence of communities and local actors is not enough to co-build public policies. There could be parallel approaches with some points of convergence at times. Different time scales and the territorial borders of communities appear to be the two main obstacles.