Established in 2009 within the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), the Fondation France-Japon has developed public and private partnerships to promote scholarly exchange in social sciences and humanities between Europe and Asia for more than ten years..

A round table devoted to the book Innovation Beyond Technology - Science for Society and Interdisciplinary Approaches, organised by FFJ in collaboration with the Institut francilien recherche innovation société (Institute for Research and Innovation in Society-IFRIS) and the Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation (Interdisciplinary Institute on Innovation-i3, UMR 9217), took place on 19 October 2020 at EHESS. This round table was the first ‘hybrid’ event organised by FFJ, bringing some 50 participants together both physically and virtually in the EHESS lecture hall.

Speakers and book contributors: Sébastien Lechevalier (economist and professor at EHESS), Sandra Laugier (philosopher and professor at University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Brice Laurent (sociologist at CSI Mines Paristech).

Panellists: Franck Aggeri (professor of management at CSI Mines ParisTech), Matthieu Montalban (University of Bordeaux) and Anne Rasmussen (historian and professor at EHESS).

Round table report

Sandra Laugier started by reminding us that innovation has long been presented as always positive, but that current technological scandals are forcing us to reflect on the notion of scientific and social progress. “All research must be based on human well-being, which is often difficult to define. Citizens’ competence to intervene on topics that concern them seems obvious, but the outlook of this book seems to suggest that it is perhaps not so obvious after all,” she concluded.

In turn, Brice Laurent pointed out that the book takes the issue of inequality created by innovation very seriously, thus highlighting one of the main criticisms of innovation. The book describes styles of criticism and theories of innovation that are connected to three ways of thinking on innovation. The first sees innovation as a religion, the myths of which need to be dismantled. The second sees innovation as a generator of excess, often with harmful and violent consequences such as the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but it also creates novelty by questioning what is currently in place. The third sees innovation as an instrument of public policy and corporate strategy, leading to a vision of society in which social progress arises naturally from technological progress. Finally, each style of innovation corresponds implicitly to a type of society.

Brice Laurent’s article on experimental forms of innovation, especially in urban planning, illustrates this point. “In San Francisco, there is a strong emphasis on technology, the use of big data and the democratic mode of functioning. Using data makes it possible to know how people ‘think’ and to combine this thinking with systems in real time. This form of innovation goes hand in hand with a vision of local democracy focused on immediate implementation. Protest movements, meanwhile, have mapped evictions caused by price hikes due to technological development. Criticising innovation can simply mean highlighting the controversies between different social projects and thus differentiating the ways of thinking about innovations”, he explained during the round table discussion.

Matthieu Montalban questioned the term ‘innovation’ and wondered whether it should not be replaced by ‘social change’ instead. Brice Laurent concluded that discussions around the term ‘innovation’ depend on how the term is perceived and its corresponding society.

The purpose of this book, as Sébastien Lechevalier pointed out during this panel, is to analyse the conditions under which a society moves from being techno-centric to human-centric, to discuss the non-technological aspects of innovation, and to go from seeing innovation as a tool for competitiveness to seeing innovation as a source of well-being. Thus, the book has a tendency to emphasise the role of social sciences and humanities in innovation, which is never exclusively technological, but also social.Our research on social innovation will continue in 2021 with the creation of a three-year international research team and a research programme on care-led innovation, both mentioned on the first page of this newsletter.

The round table report was written by Catherine Gayda, i3’s scientific mediator.

To read the full newsletter: Newsletter2021-1EN