Can one teach innovation management ?

The industrial world has embraced intensive innovation. Innovation is now a prerequisite for the competitivity and survival of companies. It is a collective and systematised process. It is essential to prepare young engineers for this reality. Armand Hatchuel and Christophe Midler believe that in order to teach this to students, it is necessary to teach industrial languages all over again. These languages include those concerned with organisation, the engineer, strategy and design. Using the example of traning programmes which they devised over the past ten years at the Paris École des Mines and more recently at the École Polytechnique, they describe the development of a teaching programme. This programme is founded on the one hand on recent theoretical advances in these four language fields, and on the other hand, on the implication for students in real-life situations involving designs which are very innovative. This teaching thereby allows one to try out, enhance and diffuse theories, concepts and tools which constitute modern capitalism's way of thinking.