Innovation: our expert opinion

However, experts believe - contrary to popular opinion - that innovation is not just limited to industry or state-of-theart technologies. It is no longer the preserve of R&D laboratories. Clients, partners, suppliers, universities and employees all contribute to the process of innovation, requiring a real mix of talent and skill.

It therefore now seems wise to describe it as a process which enables knowledge to be transformed into a new product or service, or alternatively as a way of increasing organisational productivity thanks to a new process.

History has shown that the economic success of any new product or device such as the internet and SIM cards, depends, above all, on efficient interaction between the innovator and the people or organisations which contribute to carrying the innovation forward from initial research and development to manufacture and sale. It follows that managing innovation always involves managing the human resources that are associated with it.

Innovating also means creating and stimulating collective intelligence to build support around a vision of the future which is sufficiently shared to assure coherence and success.

Now that the model of the hierarchical, pyramid-structured industrial firm is in the past, industrialised countries have gradually moved towards the so-called “information society”.

In this society, everyone can potentially access a large mass of information and be able to analyse, experiment and criticise, but also, and above all, to contribute.

By adopting innovative strategies, HR departments offer personnel a tremendous opportunity to create added value as well as a chance for professional development. With the arrival of Web 2.0 and new interactive tools such as wikis and blogs, roles within the firm are changing, too.

Participants, as actors in their own skills improvement, are also becoming contributors. For their part, bosses are invited to play a more important advisory role, thanks to a range of accessible and content-rich offers, including possibilities for monitoring and evaluation.

Other innovations coming to light include “Second life” or “serious games”, which also enable progress to be made in the experimental field.

We can clearly see here the extent to which the introduction of new learning technologies is efficiently contributing to the dissemination of a culture of innovation.