referenceinnovation.com/philosophy-of-innovation
Philosophy of Innovation - discussion between Christian (the father, innovation management consultant) and Julien Auriach (the son, a philosophy professor)
Publication : May 2025.
In entrepreneurial circles, the word innovation is on everyone's lips. The greatest entrepreneurial successes of the last 30 years have been successful innovations that have beaten established giants struggling to keep up. Is this new? Michelin and its tires at the end of the nineteenth century (see case study further down this page) did not wait for the blue ocean strategy theories (W. C. Kim and R. Mauborgne) of the early twenty-first century to grow and flourish. Yet the world is experiencing an unprecedented acceleration of the phenomenon, leading all economic players to position themselves in relation to these hyper-growth structures that are called scale-ups, centaurs, or unicorns depending on their maturity.
Just as any solid house rests on stable foundations, it's necessary to clarify what innovation is and isn't. To do this, let's call on one of those reasoning experts, philosophers. Julien Auriach is an associate professor of philosophy at the Al-Kindi high school in Lyon. The following text is a transcription by an attentive student (his own father) of his impromptu one-hour class on the subject of innovation, with a slight retelling by the student. Interview conducted by referenceinnovation.com in October 2022.
A story of budding
Etymologically, innovation arises from within (in, in Latin) like the bud of the stem. In the Littré dictionary, the second meaning of the word is explicitly botanical. It is therefore a question of renewing oneself (novare) from within, the word innovation designating both the process and the result. Innovation is the criterion, which, in retrospect, allows the historian to say: at this moment, we are changing eras. Gutenberg's printing press, the nuclear bomb, the internet... It is through innovation that the present quickly appears outdated. Curiously, the leap into the future that innovation represents is often visible in the rearview mirror: innovation is not always conscious of itself.
Innovation gives a decisive advantage to whoever possesses it, regardless of the field: from military strategy to economics, including science, political organization, industrial production, etc. Hence these questions, which resemble the quest for a Holy Grail: how to innovate? What are the rules of innovation? Questions doomed to remain unanswered, because there is no recipe for improving recipes: the raison d'être of innovation is to produce the unplanned obsolescence of previous rules. When, in 1934, Lieutenant-Colonel de Gaulle published Towards a Professional Army and proclaimed the superiority of tank mobility over the firepower of the Maginot Line, he relegated to the past the fixist strategy taught in schools, a strategy whose rules he knew by heart.
Hence this surprising little conclusion: to detect innovation is to identify the tradition in which it is inserted, the forms from which something new has emerged. And it is not certain that the author of the innovation is capable of this. Sometimes, awareness of innovation does not belong to the genius, but to his patron, his protector, his editor or his leader. A history of geniuses should be interested in all these ordinary people who had the humility and patience to put themselves at the service of the extraordinary, so that what was considered impossible could come about in each era.
​​
Here are three important authors to address the theme of innovation: Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson.
Kant and the genius, prophet of nature
According to Kant, genius is innate: it is a way for Nature to continue its work in art. Even working like Mozart, not everyone can become Mozart, because not everyone has his "gifts." Genius is clearly distinguished by Kant from the talented imitator, from the ordinary artist, although geniuses often began by imitating to train themselves. Rodin, for example, spent fourteen hours a day imitating the greats, before becoming one himself. Geniuses are not able to describe their rules: nature prescribes them through them. If we believe Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Course on Nature at the Collège de France, if we consider that nature is a "power to invent the visible," a power for the emergence of forms, then it goes without saying that artistic genius (but why not also technical, strategic, political?) is the true continuator of their work.
Nietzsche and the central place of effort in the innovation process
Nietzsche emphasizes another aspect. For him, genius is work. It would be enough to be obsessed with one's discipline to excel in it, particularly by innovating. This is perhaps not as incompatible with Kant's theory as that. For nothing prevents us from seeing in this obsession the very gift that nature gives to genius. According to Nietzsche, a work considered remarkable, exceptional, loses its luster when we move away from the product to focus on its formation process.
Bergson and the impossibility of anticipating innovation
For Bergson, one cannot say today what the future will be like later. Asked in 1920 what literature would be like in the years to come, he replied that if he knew, he would create it. The possible is lodged in the past. The possible is not a direction taken by the present, but a direction taken by the present that no longer exists. Bergson, on this theme, joins Kant (which is rare): before genius, the form it invents does not exist. Form being the organizing principle of matter, it exists from the moment we think it.
Notes and digressions of a schoolboy (and consultant)
Comment by referenceinnovation.com
Renewing yourself from within
To innovate is therefore to renew oneself from within. In business, this interior is that of an ecosystem. The so-called Open Innovation trend extends its boundaries beyond the historical or usual scope, calling on potentially unknown actors to co-innovate. The notion of a team is essential. The phenomenon of the innovator who does not realize that he is innovating is entirely observable, as is the need for a revealing pair to promote innovation. Either we learn to know, or we discover or rediscover. Witnessing the innovator's work can transform it into a transition to scale, as during the expansion of the McDonald's network (see The Founder, a film directed by John Lee Hancock). Here, innovation means identifying the potential for virtuous scaling.
What is a genius ?
Genius is more difficult to pin down. While value doesn't depend on years of experience (Le Cid, Corneille) in some organizations, placing young professionals considered gifted on a pedestal, in others, experience is required before one can claim influence or make decisions. Thus, the 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell, which states that every recognized genius has spent that time perfecting their art (which presupposes that they have some inclinations to endure, or even to call for, such self-denial), has been widely emulated in the business world. Is the business world Nietzschean? On this subject, read Sociology of a Genius, by Norbert Elias (analysis of the emergence of Mozart's genius in a favorable environment). But whatever the genius's career path in business, innovation consists of recognizing and transforming it. There are thus famous pairs (example: the Wright brothers). Genius does not reveal itself. It does not know that it is a genius, or in what way it is a genius.
An explosion of new forms
While a necessary condition for transforming an innovation into a success is to first identify it, that's not enough. A successful innovation meets an audience or a market. It reflects an expectation. The Holy Grail consists of reading it, interpreting it, and making it converge with talent. The talent of the Beatles, for example, perfectly met this expectation, collectively as a group, before disintegrating in the 1970s and producing lackluster solo careers. Danny Boyle's film Yesterday depicts a world that has seemingly forgotten the Beatles. Only a select few are aware that this group ever existed. One of them takes their repertoire on stage, and it works: the expectation is always present, the environment naturally ready to receive an avalanche of hits; or, in philosophical terms, an explosion of new forms, revealed first by the performer's friends and family, then by a witness audience.
​
There are styles of innovation, processes that can be reconstructed and therefore imitated. Example: the scientist steeped in intellectual honesty who notes an inconsistency in a line of reasoning or in a series of observations and who will not rest until he or she has reexamined all the hypotheses and all the steps one by one, until he or she finds the cause of the inconsistency, which can become a new starting point for his or her investigations. We can establish a taxonomy of innovation processes: innovation is indeed a process that fits into a tradition by going beyond it. The machine also innovates: chess programs exploiting deep learning algorithms find innovative moves that centuries of human study had not yet revealed. Researchers, like great chess players, grope, reason, transpose known results in one situation to another, but do not know how to quickly simulate a large number of games to deduce the most promising paths.
Aristotle's contingent futures
Finally, scenario planning plays an important role in the strategy consultant's work. Among the scenarios studied, there is often a so-called continuity scenario: what happens if we do nothing? The other scenarios are then compared and evaluated against this reference to inform a decision. This approach fits well with the logic of Aristotle's contingent futures.
Michelin in 1896 : an explosion of new forms
Case study provided by referenceinnovation.com
Bergson and Nietzsche were contemporaries of a particularly enduring innovation : the rolling tire.
A disrupted industry
Read in the Hachette almanac of practical life for the year 1897, under the heading Domestic Economy:
Question: I own about twenty luxury cars, writes one of the largest car rental companies in a large provincial town. My maintenance costs, replacing my cavalry, absorb almost all of my profits. How could I mitigate, at least in part, the costs that weigh so heavily on my business?
​
Answer: It is a well-known fact that the majority of reported expenses, repairs to axles, springs, lanterns, etc., come from shocks, vibrations, falls which quickly deteriorate a service car. The same is true of the horse, which "wears out" all the more quickly the more bumpy the road it travels.
The iron wheel used until now proceeds in fact at brisk paces by successive jumps, corresponding to each projection of the ground to be crossed; In reality, the horse works by uninterrupted starts, that is to say with abnormal practice, fatigue of which the traveler, tossed and stunned, takes a large part.
To remedy these defects in ordinary locomotion, it has been considered to adapt tires to all vehicles, whether horse-drawn or horseless carriages, ambulances, children's carriages, or sick carriages, as is done for bicycle racing.
The tests, carried out in the first months of 1896, were very conclusive. The costs of maintaining and renewing a carriage, estimated at 2.60 francs per day by the companies, have fallen by 50%. The saving in horse fatigue has varied from 1/4 to 1/2; a horse that lasts 3 years lasts, with pneumatic tires, from 4 to 5 years. The traveler, less inconvenienced, and who goes faster, is more inclined to take a carriage; there is therefore an increase in revenue; an additional 3 francs per day has already been calculated.
​
These are all considerations that are worth thinking about carefully and that will be appreciated by all those who are competent in the matter. These are the ones that have decided the great tire manufacturer, M.A. Michelin, 7, rue Gounod, in Paris, to have the new tires for cars made in its Clermont-Ferrand factories, mounted on wheels, with rims made of wood or steel, with direct or tangent spokes, the price of which does not exceed, for a car with 4 wheels, the saving made on repairs for a single year.
​
The pneumatic tire car quickly took its place in the world of coachbuilding. As soon as the results of the first tests carried out by a Paris rental company were known, Mr. A. Michelin received, ten days later, an order for 25 sets, or 100 wheels, to be delivered at high speed. It is therefore very likely that in a very short time, travelers will finally no longer have to suffer the unpleasant vibrations, noise of shaking windows, jolts, of cars rolling on the ground.
​
To use a very accurate expression, vehicles equipped with Michelin tires will glide over the pavement as calmly and peacefully as a boat on still water.
​
This disruptive innovation is a success thanks to a well-understood economic model: the problem expressed by an economic actor (future customer), the diagnosis, the idea, a broad scope of application (horse-drawn or horseless carriages, ambulances, children's carriages, sick carriages), the report of concrete tests, the precise quantification of the benefits, the recurring reminder of the well-being of the traveler (general public, ultimately customer), the insistent repetition of the word tire in italics (the product, declined with its options), the convincing matching of the cost of the solution with the expected benefits, finally the little story of a spectacular first commercial success, before the conclusion entirely dedicated to the traveler – the ultimate beneficiary of the innovation.​