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The socio-technical analysis of innovations makes it possible to enrich the previous contributions, in particular by going beyond the overly pronounced focus on certain components of the systems: the entrepreneur, the technical object, the user, etc. According to this relational approach, the success of an innovation depends above all on the progressive construction of a network of stakeholders who will support it and give it substance. It is therefore understandable that the central issue becomes recruiting allies, identifying their expectations and translating the project in such a way as to interest them (Akrich et al. 1988a, 2006). The originality of this point of view is summed up in the following statement, which is rather iconoclastic with regard to the usual sacralization of the inventor: the fate of an innovation does not depend so much on the intrinsic qualities of the idea or the object conceived as on the solidity and breadth of the chain that will support it. Innovating therefore consists of building and maintaining a chain of association that is increasingly extended, solid and stable, by attracting and recruiting new actors. Kline and Rosenberg (1986) develop a vision of innovation as an interactive process, or chain-linked model, compatible with the socio-technical approach. The consensus that has gradually taken hold in the academic sphere around this collective and systemic understanding of innovation has not prevented institutions responsible for innovation policies from maintaining approaches that are too linear and/or focused on a few key actors (Joly 2019).

In order to develop and strengthen the innovation network, one must regularly agree to transform the project into a new form acceptable to new entrants. The adoption of an innovation thus goes hand in hand with an adaptation, or even a reinvention of the “product” (which (Gaglio 2011) summarized through the neologism “adaptation”). Moreover, recruiting or losing an actor leads to a new network, which is likely to reconfigure the project. At each stage, “the innovation is transformed, redefining its properties and its public” (Akrich et al. 1988b, p. 31). This approach does not prejudge the decisive role of any one actor (who may be quite ordinary: a prototypist, a salesperson, a supplier, a client, etc.), especially since his or her influence may vary considerably from one stage to another. Moreover, many innovation trajectories develop despite the exit of the inventor’s network or of a key player from the beginning.

It is thus necessary to avoid the trap of reconstruction in the form of a success story, with its classic ingredients: passionate and determined innovators; their promising intuitions stubbornly propagated toward a demand (initially reticent, then benevolent); a concept or product that is “already there” that only needs to be refined to overcome technical difficulties or customer reticence, etc. However, even to understand a posteriori a success story, one must try to refuse a finalistic explanation: the receiving society, the convinced market, the controlled efficiency or profitability. “It is impossible to use the end of the story to explain its beginning and its course” (Latour et al. 1991, p. 462). It is therefore a question of starting again from the beginning of the story, in a pragmatic way, in order to describe and understand its extensions, its reversals and its adhesions; that is to say, “to explain its elaboration without assuming it to be acquired” (Latour and Callon 1990, p. 23). A first principle of symmetry follows from this: to consider the innovation under construction, without prejudging its success or failure (which must be explained in the same way), which Trabal (1999) has underlined the importance of in the sports sector. Hence the interest of innovation narratives in process studies (innovation in the making) (Hoholm and Araujo 2011), a trend that invites us to look at trajectories that are still unstable, or in the process of stabilization, rather than at the already stabilized products and the formalized collectives that underlie them. Hence the importance of works that are interested in this way in innovations that have not met their market or penetrated society (Latour 1992). This perspective can be compared with the contributions of Latour (1989), who very early on was sensitive to science in action, that is to say in the process of being made. It is indeed a way of capturing and then showing the experiences and actions of all stakeholders in the face of opportunities, uncertainties, disagreements and trade-offs to be made (Hoholm and Araujo 2011).

In innovation studies, materiality is generally taken into account, but in a somewhat reductive way. To put it simply, technical determinism makes it an obstacle (to be overcome or bypassed), the techno-centric approach focuses on functionality (to be domesticated), and diffusionism considers material elements as static and malleable entities. A second symmetry, embodied in the very notion of sociotechnics, allows the theory we are interested in to go further: the material or technical dimensions cannot be separated from the social dimensions. An innovation network is thus conceived as an assembly of human actors and non-human elements: materials, objects, prototypes, workshops, environments of use or diffusion, plans, regulatory texts, etc. On both sides, interests or constraints are redefined according to the context and concrete uses. Such a conception can seem destabilizing, but it allows us “to take the non-humans out of a status oscillating between the docile resource, mobilizable without effort by the social actors, and the absolute constraint, over which they would have no control” (Grossetti 2006).

Non-human elements are not static. They are constantly evolving (Ingold 2012): they change according to the transformations of the socio-technical network. First, because they are manipulated and transformed by the other actors of the innovation. Second, and more subtly, because their very properties are redefined according to the uses and other entities. For example, according to the phases of the innovation trajectory of kitesurfing (Boutroy et al. 2014), waves were initially “reliefs” that slowed down and disrupted an unmanageable glide, focused on speed; whereas later, new users with modified gear perceived them as “tremors”, or means of making them allies that they could collaborate with to reinvent the practice in an acrobatic mode. Symmetrically, human actors and their behaviors can thus be modified in return by the non-human elements with, or through which, they associate in the innovation.

Put another way, objects can have agentivity, that is, they have capacities to make humans act: they obstruct, incite, enable, associate, mediate (Latour 2006; Quéré 2015). For example, the Joëlette is a single-wheel supported-traction chair that allows severely disabled people to access hiking trails. Because of its shape and weight, it mobilizes and associates several conveyors and accompaniers who must be one with each other to move. The socio-technical choices stabilized in this innovation (in particular the absence of motorization) make the machine a hybrid between man and things that creates interdependence, and therefore attachment (in all senses of the term: material, social, sensory and affective) between disabled and able-bodied actors (Kasprzak and Perrin 2017).

A third principle of symmetry forces us to consider both associations (additions of functionalities, materials, actors in a network) and dissociations. Indeed, in some cases, “the structuring element is simply the removal of one of the elements” of the network (Goulet and Vinck 2012, p. 197). This is what has been observed, for example, in the sports domain, with regard to the trajectories of objects that are innovative because of their lightness, the simplification of use allowed, etc. (Hallé et al. 2014; Soulé and Lefèvre 2016). We then speak of “withdrawal” innovations, which are structured by detachment, which in fact implies reconfigurations of the network. Withdrawal or reduction is the very objective of innovation, which Kimberly (1981), in the organizational context, calls exnovation (abandoning a practice or a product, such as the use of paper in a company). Innovation therefore amounts to opting out of something that is no longer deemed useful or sustainable (Goulet and Vinck 2017). Detachment can even concern a human actor, as in the case of exclusively female mountaineering groups (Ottogalli-Mazzacavallo and Boutroy 2020). This innovation of practice is indeed based on the progressive dissociation of men, especially in the high mountains, to enable an emancipatory and autonomous mountaineering experience, which is not without controversy or compromise.

Take, for example, the stormy history of kitesurfing. This is not one of a brilliant intuition and first prototypes progressively perfected to the point of performance for a public captive to this invention (Boutroy et al. 2014). From the elaboration of the first inventions by lead users to an undeniable commercial success, it took two decades of reversals, failures and transformations to laboriously extend, through translations of heterogeneous interests, a socio-technical network associating pioneer users, capricious wind, fickle journalists, patents, tourist actors (agencies, service providers), irreducible waves, board and sail manufacturers, fickle sports federations, political elected officials and Kevlar threads, among other factors. Rech and Paget (2018) pointed out that the socio-technical approach allowed for a consolidated understanding of innovation networks in the outdoor sports sector, for example the difficult territorial innovation and practices in a small winter sports resort (Rech et al. 2009); or the creation of a company and the uncertain launch of innovative services (Paget et al. 2010). The success of these innovations is each time linked to the consolidation of an extended chain of human actors (managers, supervisors, elected officials, athletes, etc.) and non-human elements (slope, wall, snow, wind, etc.). This work also reminds us that innovation often goes hand in hand with the emergence of controversies that need to be resolved (see, for example, the case of the development of motorized recreation in a natural park (Haye and Mounet 2014)).

A comparison between the manufacture of ultra-light mountaineering equipment (backpack or harness, see (Soulé and Lefèvre 2015)) and that of a new adjustable kayak seat within two different very small businesses (VSBs) shows varying levels of success. Yet failure or success can be explained symmetrically according to similar principles: growing interest and attachment (or not) of multiple allies, strength or fragility of ties (likely to produce continuous reconfigurations of the network), and ability (or not) to compromise – especially on technical perfectionism (Soulé et al. 2014). If, in all cases, contingency and unpredictability are prevalent, the question of the capacity of the innovation’s project owners to compromise on their initial project or program appears essential. It is in particular with regard to this aspect that it is possible to understand the contrasting fates of innovations carried by a pole manufacturing company, whose different ages testify to very different abilities to compromise (technical, commercial, entrepreneurial) in order to achieve a successful operation (Hallé et al. 2016; Vignal et al. 2018).

The socio-technical approach nevertheless sometimes struggles to shed light on what, from a normative point of view, makes possible (favors, hinders, weakens, etc.) the associations between actors in innovation. Quéré (1989) was quick to point out this limit on the clearance of regulations (collective norms, interpersonal relations) and regularities (structure). However, innovation activities can be considered as dependent on and determined by different kinds of social characteristics.

For example, in line with the sociology of networks developed by the new economic sociology (Cochoy and Grossetti 2008), it is possible to take better account of the dynamics of pairing between actors. Grossetti (2006) suggests strengthening “the explicitness of what makes up the network, the relationships”, including in innovative activities (innovation networks, business creation) (Grossetti 2008a, 2008b; Grossetti and Barthe 2008). The first phases of innovation are thus characterized by a strong dependence on prior interpersonal relationships (we speak of social embedding). However, the expansion of the network will inevitably (and sometimes abruptly) involve enrolling new actors by escaping from personal relationships, sometimes by detaching oneself from one’s “close friends” (known as decoupling). This allows us to understand the difficulties in making a success of switching between the exploration and exploitation of an innovation, or the importance of the many mediation mechanisms (objects and professionals involved in putting people in touch with each other) that proliferate around innovation activities: clusters, incubators, economic agencies, directories, etc. This interpretive framework thus is drawn upon to understand the role and changing weight of interpersonal relationships in an innovation trajectory of a novel sliding device (Hallé and Boutroy 2017).

KEY POINTS – At first sight difficult to access, particularly due to its innovative and radical character, the socio-technical analysis of innovations has the merit of “hammering the nail in” by breaking down most of the commonplaces that are frequently trotted out about innovation. It invites us to study failures as well as successes; to avoid focusing on the inventor and to substitute a collective or even systemic interpretation; and to avoid isolating the social and technical dimensions of the processes being studied. Indeed, innovation implies dealing with complex material elements (technologies, practice spaces, materials, objects, production systems, etc.) that will have a determining influence on the future of an invention. Three principles of symmetry summarize the foundations of this approach: “equal attention paid to successes and failures, to humans and non-humans, but also to associations and dissociations” (Goulet and Vinck 2012, p. 219). This reticular interpretive framework allowing detailed and realistic accounts of innovation dynamics will constitute the central approach mobilized in this handbook. Innovation – whether it starts in an R&D office or in a lead user’s garage – is never a solitary process. From the invention phase onwards, it is important to surround oneself with support and resources in order to make an idea or a prototype exist, evolve and become more reliable. An innovation trajectory is a collective journey involving human and non-human actors, because to succeed, the invention must be socialized and appropriated by increasingly large and heterogeneous groups.

THE LIMITS OF THESE APPROACHES – By enriching, almost infinitely, the parameters and entities to be taken into consideration, this model undeniably makes the analysis more complex. It provides a valuable “education of the eye” that helps us to avoid many simplifying traps, but at the same time requires adjustments. Without questioning the status of material elements as “acting entities”, there are obviously differentiated properties between the domain of humans and non-humans, which this theory tends, if applied unqualifiedly, to level out excessively (Quéré 2015). Moreover, because of its anchoring in actor-network theory (Akrich et al. 2006), socio-technical analysis proposes a theory of action (what moves actors) that risks being reduced to strategic rationality; it is indeed largely about tactics, enrolments, interest, etc. (Quéré 1989). The danger is then that we cut ourselves off from certain contributions of the classical social sciences, which are nonetheless capable of taking into account the external determinants that precede innovation activities. By giving them their rightful place, it is possible to better understand how actors link or associate (types of social relations, structures), or – by mobilizing the achievements of more traditional sociologies (lifestyle, dispositions, cultures, etc.) – the phenomena of attraction or resistance to a particular enlistment or innovation (Gaglio 2012).

In this respect, the recent revivals of economic sociology around attachments (Cochoy 2012a) and market arrangements (Callon et al. 2013) provide promising support for understanding the establishment of links in innovation processes. Above all, it is important to remember “that these positions and programs complement and enrich each other more than they contradict each other” (Cochoy 2012b, p. 37).