Gestion 2000 2018
Chabaud, D.; Corbel, P.; Janssen, F. and Sahut, J.M. « 80 ans d’innovation en gestion », Gestion 2000, Vol.34, No 5-6, March 2018, pp. 51-61
Introduction:
Celebrating the 80th anniversary of an academic journal is not a common occurrence. Some might even be surprised to hear that a management science journal is 80 years old. On the face of it, it is hard to believe that 1936 saw the birth of the first French-language academic journal in management. Yet 1936 was also the year of the birth of the Academy of Management. Gestion 2000 could therefore be one of the markers of the structuring of the field. Innovation in management, while calling for questions to be asked about the place of innovation in management practices, both retrospectively and prospectively, also calls into question the dynamics of our discipline. Although management (or management sciences) has been structured primarily over the last century as a discipline (Pavis, 2003 a and b, Marco, 2011), the first schools of management appeared in the nineteenth century (de Fournas, 2007, Blanchard, 2012, Bodé, 2012, Passant, 2016).
Gestion 2000 is a generalist journal that publishes articles with managerial implications: "As a forum for meetings between the academic and business worlds, Revue Gestion 2000 publishes original articles on management research with central managerial implications. Its aim is to build a bridge between the academic and business worlds through a system of double blind reading."
To mark its 80th anniversary, Gestion 2000 called for contributions to a special issue on the theme of Innovation in Management. This theme seemed to us to be of twofold interest.
Firstly, innovation is a key word for companies in a changing environment. It even explains economic evolution, if we recall the work of Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter (1912). Secondly, by conditioning business performance and even driving economic dynamics, innovation provides a window onto the various disciplines of management science: marketing, strategy, accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, human resources, information systems, etc., in keeping with the journal's tradition of openness.
In order to encourage debate, we have adopted a two-pronged approach to soliciting contributions: (1) the classic call for papers which, after a double-blind review process, resulted in a selection of articles, and (2) a series of invitations to colleagues to give their views on the theme. This issue contains three types of contribution: articles that have undergone the classic double-blind evaluation process, articles by guest authors that have been the subject of direct exchanges with the team of editors-in-chief, and 'points of view' that stray further from academic norms. In all, there are 19 articles and viewpoints in this double issue. While the category distinction is relevant for structuring the articles in this issue, this introductory article proposes to put the texts into perspective around two structuring lines:
- Innovation(s) in Management as a discipline, in which we will show how the journal's itinerary has intersected with the itinerary of our discipline,
- Innovation in practices.
In many respects, innovation management as a discipline reflects the structuring of the field of management sciences. The latter reflects the synthesis that a journal such as Gestion 2000 attempted to achieve between reflective practitioners (among the first pillars of management sciences were the works of Taylor, Fayol and Barnard) and the social science disciplines that pre-existed it. Among the latter, economics played a particularly important role (Marco, 2011) and it was as Annales de sciences économiques appliquées that the journal Gestion 2000 began its history. This influence of economics is strong in the field of innovation, where the tutelary figure of Schumpeter plays a key role, but, the management of innovation then followed a path comparable to that of management sciences in general, with two interrelated phenomena:
- That of institutionalisation and autonomisation. The field has set up its own associations (the Academy of Management, which was founded at the same time as Gestion 2000) and disciplinary journals.
- That of fragmentation, with the field splintering into multiple sub-disciplines. Thus, despite their common Schumpeterian roots, entrepreneurship and innovation management diverged. Innovation management was based more on Schumpeter's Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Schumpeter, 1951), in which he emphasised large R&D structures, and entrepreneurship on the original figure of the entrepreneur in his Theory of Economic Evolution (Schumpeter, 1912). In addition to the organisation of innovation and entrepreneurship, we will apply to innovation the frameworks developed in marketing (the marketing of innovation becoming almost a sub-discipline in its own right), human resources management, finance, etc. as specific practices emerge (financing through successive rounds of funding from business angels and venture capitalists, for example). Finally, the emergence of new information and communication technologies will link information systems management and innovation management.
The content of this issue reflects these trends. An initial series of articles traces the development of thinking on innovation. The structure of the issue then incorporates the results of this division of the field by successively addressing an entrepreneurial approach, the point of view of innovation management in the strict sense, and then the organisational and human aspects associated with innovation.
Link:
The article is available on Cairn.