Formulating generative and federative concepts, a new role for researchers in open innovation processes
Résumé
The aspiration of organisations aiming to achieve societal goals often leads them to question their approaches toward innovation. Indeed, wicked problems such as ecosystem preservation require opening up for systemic innovations. Despite the potential complementarities between open innovation and sustainability orientation, the relationships between them remain poorly explored in the literature. Yet, specific management challenges may arise: how to engage stakeholders in collective innovation processes when economic interests may not be obvious? And how to foster their creativity? Research works have highlighted the new roles raised by participatory design processes for researchers, yet they do not focus on the role researchers can play to support collective and innovative design reasoning. This paper specifically addresses this issue, drawing on recent design theories, and focusing on agriculture. It analyses two contrasted empirical cases in which researchers have contributed to open innovation initiatives aiming at enhancing agricultural sustainability, showing significant achievements but also difficulties to engage diverse stakeholders. This paper highlights the interests of formulating “generative and federative concepts” to open design spaces and hereby both enhance generativity and the engagement of potentially key stakeholders. It also analyses how researchers producing knowledge on the functioning of complex social-ecological systems may help formulating such concepts.