Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 42

Induction does not mean that the survey is methodless. Anthropology approaches the question of novelty as a “total social fact”, which includes the utilitarian and the imaginary, to use the expression of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss in The Gift (1925). This means that anthropology is not limited to the technical dimension of innovation. It shows that technical rationality is not sufficient to explain the social circulation of an innovation, be it to accept or oppose it.

Its diffusion depends on the power relations in which it is involved, on who will gain or lose from the implementation of the change, or on the different meanings given to it by the actors. The anthropology of innovation does not postulate technical determinism. On the contrary, it shows that every innovation is embedded in a triple material, social and symbolic dimension. What can vary is the weight that each approach will give to one or other of these dimensions to explain the “success” or “failure” of an innovation.

At the heart of theoretical discussion, there remains one open question, that of knowing whether objects are actors (as in the “actor-network” by Madeleine Akrich, Michel Callon and Bruno Latour), whether they participate in societal action as systems of concrete objects that organize the constrained play of social actors (as in the anthropology of material culture), or whether they produce a technical determinism that constitutes a constraining force for social actors (as in the vision of a part of the world of “sciences and techniques”). At the very least, it is necessary to distinguish between active objects such as viruses that act without the help of men, and passive objects such as a pen that depend on human beings to act.

Another debate is whether an innovation occurs incrementally or by breakthrough, following the work of Christensen (2002). Very often, we find that a disruptive innovation does not exist, as such, but is the result of a whole aggregation of incremental innovations.

Very often, the term innovation is associated with invention. It is understood as a moment of creativity, the production of a new idea, a new technology or a new service, individual or collective, as in the departments for “innovation and development” (or marketing), in companies. Conversely, the anthropology of innovation chooses another division of reality, another scale of observation, which shows that innovation is a collective process over time that takes place in a nonlinear and non-mechanical way.

This is why anthropological and sociological qualitative surveys, such as that of Norbert Alter, will formally distinguish three stages: that of invention, the moment of creation of something new, such as a new molecule in the pharmaceutical field, a new digital technology, a new agricultural technique, a new distribution system, a new model of management; that of innovation, which is the social process by which an invention is diffused through digital and “pre-digital” social networks that are supportive to the interplay of actors in favor or against this or that change; and that of reception, which is the moment when the invention is transformed into an object or a service that must correspond to a use, to a material or symbolic utility, and therefore to a problem to be solved, in a professional or domestic space.

Throughout the process, “invention” is often transformed. The transformation, reinterpretation or translation, depending on the theoretical approaches, of the invention conditions its progress through a company, an administration or an NGO. It is even very often observed that one of the conditions of success of an invention is it has been reinterpreted throughout this itinerary up to its arrival at the final user’s home, whether this be a company or a consumer. Innovation in anthropology is part of a collective process of change made up of the interplay of actors, in which relations of power and cooperation, energy, logistics and the magico-religious intertwine.