General Introduction: Systemic Innovations and Transformation of Organizational Models

Innovation is at the heart of the dynamic growth model based on uncertainty, risk and profit. In the current context of crisis and globalization, entrepreneurs, companies and public institutions for economic action are challenged by the need to renew technologies, organizational patterns and production and consumption modes as quickly as possible.

Whether gradual or radical, innovation is embedded in a complex process characterized by a large amount of feedback and interaction. The innovative organization is a dynamic system composed of specific and diversified competencies. By acquiring, combining and mobilizing these competencies, the innovation actor (entrepreneur or organization) can create technological resources and change the relationships it maintains with its environment. This explains the importance of design, application and development management in the implementation of an innovation process.

An innovation system mobilizes a set of knowledge and skills that are generated by learning processes and embedded in its memory. This knowledge must be enriched to be valued through the development, use and commercial launch of new goods, services and technologies. The survival of the system depends on its ability to innovate, which enables it to face external aggression, to transform itself and to endure. External stimuli (competition, product substitutability, consumer incentives, innovation policies, etc.) are generated by the economic context and act on entrepreneurs and companies as a means of selection. Selection procedures are shaped by the business climate: the nature of the product market, the availability of capital and labor, the pace of innovation, the effects of public policies, the diverse demands of producers and consumers, etc. They can therefore create alternatives to the mode of operation, management and production of a given enterprise (or a particular innovation system) (Uzunidis and Saulais 2017).

The business climate, in any case, creates barriers or opportunities for the organization. The unpredictability of results and the possible existence of alternatives are the main inherent uncertainties in innovation activities. Moreover, since the innovation process is a learning and knowledge-enhancement process, the innovative organization must constantly make internal adjustments and review its relationships with its environment. It also goes without saying that, through their actions, the enterprise and the entrepreneur transform the socio-technical context and shape the surrounding economy.

In short, innovation can only be apprehended if the economist and the manager use a multifaceted analysis of the evolutionary relationships that are established between the actor and the system. Innovation unquestionably contributes to growth and, above all, to economic and social change. The success of its multiplier effects depends as much on the effectiveness of the economic policies applied by public decision-makers to support the act of entrepreneurship and innovation as on the strategies implemented by companies in the field of production, acquisition, application or dissemination of knowledge and new ideas. The most difficult element, however, is to predict its direction: areas of application of science in production, combinatory effects of knowledge and techniques, needs revealed and/or satisfied, etc. It is therefore hard to say with certainty where the trajectory of innovations is heading, although, given the immense volume of scientific and technical knowledge accumulated, diverse calls for change and the strategic orientations of large companies - pivots in particular sectors - some indications of the evolution of the socio-technical paradigm may emerge.

Innovation is inseparable from an ongoing questioning of the social relations and institutional structures that characterize, at a given time, a given economy. Innovation is the result of close relationships between producers and consumers, asymmetric information or asymptomatic micro- and macroeconomic growth processes. It arises from imperfection or imbalance and contributes, in turn, to making the economic field perfectible but also unbalanced. The "flaws" that characterize an economic system are nevertheless important sources of opportunities for investment, production and dissemination of new market values. However, in order to achieve this, it is necessary for the economic mechanisms to find themselves, at one time or another, in line with one another.

Time intervenes in the preparation, organization and, quite simply, in the seizing of the opportunities that the market offers to the agents who are supposed to realize new productive combinations. The synchronization phase of the socio-economic and technical processes leading to innovation thus becomes crucial. Synchronization means that several processes take place at the same time. It is an action of coordination of several operations that take place (or should take place) simultaneously. This coordination can take place spontaneously, opportunely or inopportunely, but more often than not the voluntarist strategies of economic and political agents set in motion at the same time actions to increase the value of capital, reorganize production structures and entities, create new markets and reveal new needs. The synchronization of innovation processes depends on the norms, rules, traditions and institutions through which economic functions (including power relations) are organized and through which the choices and activities, in our case, of innovation are compatible with each other in time and space. Moreover, the synchronization of these processes must be considered through the interaction abilities and strategies of companies, consumers and public authorities, as well as through ways of coordinating their actions with the aim of creating or organizing a market, which must amortize investments, mitigate risks and guarantee, for a certain period of time, the vitality of business.

The synchronization of innovation processes can be studied through the prism, among others, of the entrepreneurship, enterprise, work organization, expansion strategy, choice of location and macroeconomic contexts (Uzunidis 2018). How do entrepreneurs and companies mobilize their networks to innovate? What are the success factors from which an idea can become an innovation and create value? How is the diffusion of innovations organized? How does the company transform itself? How does the economic and socio-technical environment influence the evolution of global or specific innovation systems? How does a particular innovation articulate with other innovations (ancillary or related) to lead to the emergence of innovation clusters?

Novelty disturbs routines, especially since, before its appearance and generalization, a whole set of processes are triggered that may not be socially and strategically controllable. Innovation is a result; a result of human work, of a process that brings together individuals with different statuses, different roles and particular social functions. Individual work is defined as much by the task performed as by the organization that frames it, that implements it. However, this work is only partial in terms of the result (of the innovation). The necessary knowledge, skill, information, creativity, funding, etc. that contribute to the choice and decision come from different time and geographical horizons. Moreover, they are transmitted and grouped together following explicit and implicit cooperation procedures that are not always immediately visible. In addition to the difficulty of studying all the processes leading to the realization of an economic novelty, there is also the fear of the unknown to which innovation leads the company and the economy as a whole.

Systemic innovation is born and spreads from a disruptive innovation that stems from the socio-technical system of innovation, which itself is "naturally" unstable. This innovation is multiplied by the interplay of actors, thanks to incremental intra- and inter-sectoral innovations, and also thanks to disruptive subsidiary, ancillary and related innovations, leading to the creation of new combinations of innovations, known as "systemic innovations" (product, process, organization, management or commercial innovations). In their turn, systemic innovations (sets of innovations from new combinations allowed through the diffusion/adaptation of the disruptive innovation) again disrupt the socio-technical system whose robustness depends on the stability of the routines it generates.

In the complex economy, systemic innovation is largely due to the fact that a company tends to make greater use of the resources of its environment (education, environment, health, finance, inter-industrial links, communication, needs and aspirations, etc.) than to invest, for example, in all the phases of achieving the combination of knowledge, skills, ideas, technologies, capital, etc. This can surely be explained by the fact that investments in the acquisition of production resources are less costly than those devoted to the training of these resources. Under these conditions, the collective profitability of capital may be high, while individual profitability may be insufficient; this leads to the reorganization of market structures through the acquisition or disappearance of those companies that do not have the financial means to maintain their place in the innovation system. The ensuing concentration may create routines that (1) place the system on a "path of dependence" and (2) predefine the evolutionary trajectories of systemic innovations. The...