Understanding innovation in industry to think about engineering school training

Abstract

Designing a training program dedicated to innovation in engineering schools raises challenging questions. Our objective here is to understand the representations that 22 innovators have of their activity in order to be able to model different archetypical categories of innovator. We conducted individual interviews to study their discourse, then we analyzed them in two stages, firstly, using Iramuteq software, and secondly, manually. We thus have identified three archetypical forms of innovative actors which show that there is more than one path to becoming the leader of an innovative project. Based on this, we suggest a two-level innovation training program.

Keywords: entrepreneurship, expertise, innovation training program, maritime industry, multidisciplinarity.