Jean-Jacques CHANARON, Rui LUO, Yingchuan YU
Éditions Campus ouvert, Grenoble, France

There are thousands of books and articles in peer-reviewed academic journals on innovation and few are based on applied empirical case studies. The three authors have a long academic experience as professors, researchers and senior lecturers in Europe, China and in The United States in particular in the field of economics and management of technology and innovation at bachelor, master and doctoral levels. They carried out research during several decades on innovation in small and medium enterprises and the automotive industry. They joined forces in this interesting book aiming at adding some bricks on the knowledge wall as well as insights for helping decision makers to improve their practices in innovation and technology management. They explicitly do not target a theoretical contribution but present the results of their own field research developed over a long period of time and in many different geographical and sectoral contexts as well as different size of organizations.
The first chapter is mainly conceptual dealing with the notions of entrepreneur and innovation as the basic framework for the forthcoming case studies. These two concepts are at the core of contemporary economics and management science and attract more and more attention from scholars, managers and politicians. The book is fully in line with the Schumpeterian perspective in which technological, organizational and social innovations are a key if not the only element for economic growth and wealth.
The second chapter reports a research on innovation capabilities and practices in small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in high technology industries, comparing China and France through a quantitative approach using a survey with several hundreds of firms.
The third part deals with an in-depth case study in one of the most mature manufacturing industries, namely the automotive industry, through a systemic discussion of the future of the electric vehicle, which is currently presented as the next “automobile revolution”. This chapter is an up-date of forty-five years of research on this “hot” topic and is based on information gathered in international sources.
The fourth and last chapter presents and examines a series of methods and tools supposed to help managers to give a value to innovation.
Due to its applied nature, this book aims at targeting students and scholars in business administration, policy makers as well as managers and practitioners in innovative businesses. After all, academic research has no value without a validation by practitioners in the real world!
The main contribution of this book to the debate on innovation in the globalized economy is clearly its simplicity, avoiding the arrogant jargon usually in fashion in the academic community, and its deliberate choice of being affordable to a large public. Hypotheses are based on a long-lasting knowledge of the field and can be used for interesting discussions of the future.

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Éditions Campus ouvert, Grenoble, France
• Language: English
• ISBN : 979-10-90293-44-1