Sailors, Engineers, Innovation – MARINOV

Reactivity and agility now tend to be the buzzwords of innovation policies, whether public or private, civilian or military. For armies, they are a key element in the response to strategic uncertainty and fast-changing threats. In this context, the Ministry of Defence has been carrying out an in-depth reform of its organisation for nearly three years to meet the challenges of innovation. Beyond this concept, with its sometimes ill-defined outline, there is an overriding need to reduce the capacity loops and maintain the leadership. The need for adaptation is therefore strong, in a process that now involves a large number of actors, governmental and private, civilian and military, whether they are researchers, engineers, technicians or the end user, with each military being called upon to be an actor in innovation at its own level. The practices are also diverse and marked by a series of disruptions: these affect the technologies implemented, the scale of the programmes concerned, but also managerial practices. This diversity of practices and actors calls for an assessment and the wording of recommendations, in particular with a the aim of better training of the stakeholders, both at the Ministry Defence and in civilian engineering training courses for defence-related issues. The programme proposed here is designed to apply the tools and methods of socio-historical analysis to the issue of innovation management by focusing on the French Navy and the naval systems it implements. The surveys will be conducted on all four components of the Navy, taken in their cultural, organisational and technical diversity as elements of a complex adaptive system confronted with the challenges of a new strategic situation and a new organisation.The choice of this field of study is driven by the envinronment and by the coherence of a system. The first is related to the strong involvement of the partners of this project in the naval environment and their involvement in the structuring of naval innovation in the Brest-based cluster. The second results from the global interdependence of apparently heterogeneous constitutive elements. These surveys will make it possible to draw up a cartography of the actors, but also to characterise the nature of their interactions and the places where they take place. They will also aim to highlight, where appropriate, emerging issues likely to become obstacles to innovation processes. Particular attention will be paid here to the ethical challenges of innovation in essential cross-cutting areas of research such as artificial intelligence.The approach adopted from a diachronic perspective will make it possible to identify changes in the respective roles of the different actors in a shifting institutional context, while at the same time highlighting any national specificities that may emerge. A literature review will complement the field survey and provide elements for comparison with the approaches implemented in other countries. The methodical analysis developed within the framework of this programme will lead to the production of analyses and recommendations designed for the various people involved, as well as the development of a theoretical corpus whose conclusions will not be limited to the naval environment exclusively and can be adapted to other environments. To this end, a significant effort will be made to share scientific information and provide training.