EIS Presentation

Background

How do you innovate in an ever more uncertain world?

The processes of designing, producing and distributing goods and services are undergoing profound scientific, technical, social and economic transformations.

Often described in terms of inevitability, acceleration and unpredictability, these changes are nevertheless subject to technological choices and business models, political decisions and public debate. The purpose of the specialist Business, Innovation, Society programme is to provide keys to help understand and influence these transformations in research, innovation and regulation.

Recent geopolitical, ecological and financial upheavals are clear evidence: these transformations impact on all stakeholders, forcing them to articulate their reasoning, their identities and their practices to allow innovations to emerge, develop, find applications and make sense for their different client groups. Innovating implies taking risks for entrepreneurs and managers, but often also for users and consumers.

In business, innovations entail research and development, design and production, marketing and evaluation. They also have to be integrated with communities and systems of choice that allow experiment, hybridisation with existing practices, the testing of technical, organisational and legal standards. Today, this is essential in innovations are to contribute to sustainable development and corporate social responsibility.

Objectives

The specialist Masters in Business, Innovation, Society (EIS) focuses on an approach to innovation processes that is sensitive to the multiplicity of their practical dimensions – cognitive, technological, organisational, political, social and commercial. These processes are tackled using conceptual and methodological tools forged by the social sciences, originating primarily in organisation theory, the sociology of science and technology, the sociology of labour, economic sociology and management science. The EIS Masters is a research-based training curriculum designed to give students a corpus of multidisciplinary and crosscutting knowledge and expertise, which they can use to:

analyse the environment, context and dynamics of innovative design;
analyse and understand sociotechnical controversies;
produce and use indicators of scientific and technological dynamics in a given field;
understand the diversity of standards and constraints that structure and influence the activities of different organisational units (economic and financial constraints, certification and quality standards, methods of organisation,…);
define the relations between knowledge production, technological innovation and group action;
play a steering and coordinating role within systems of stakeholders implicated in innovation processes;
understand the challenges and cognitive frameworks of consultation and public debate relating to innovation.

At the end of the course, students should be able to implement these skills in a variety of professional contexts and spheres of application, covered by specialist courses within training modules: life sciences, health and biotechnologies, environment and sustainable development, nanotechnologies, information and communication technologies.

Benefits

The specialist EIS programme enjoys a threefold grounding in structures of excellence, leading European players in innovation-related fields:

the “Paris-East University” Research and Higher Education Hub, through Paris-East Marne-la-Vallée University, École nationale des ponts et chaussées and the ESIEE-Paris Group
the ParisTech Institute of Science and Technology, through two engineering schools: AgroParisTech and École nationale des ponts et chaussées
several research labs in the Paris region belonging to the GIS Institut Francilien “Recherche Innovation et Société” (IFRIS) research network: LATTS (UPEMLV, CNRS, Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussées), SenS (INRA), CERMES (CNRS, Inserm, UPD, EHESS) and Centre Koyré (CNRS, EHESS, MNHN)

EIS also has numerous regular teaching, placement or research partnerships:

École des Mines de Paris, École Normale Supérieure de Cachan, Paris-Dauphine University, École Polytechnique ParisTech, EM-Lyon
Geneva University, Manchester University, Warwick University,Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, University of California Berkeley
Accenture, ANDRA, Caisse des Dépôts, Compagnie de Saint-Gobain, EDF, France Télécom, InVivo, La Poste, SNCF, Soffinova...

Openings

The programme taught in the specialist EIS Masters 2 is a social science research course. It can lead on to a PhD for a career in academic research and teaching, or in innovation management at a strategic level...

EIS can also underpin the skills acquired in a variety of professional contexts: R&D engineer and manager, consultant, project manager or design director…The sectors in which these skills can be applied are also diverse: Project design and management functions in public research, national and local government departments or NGOs; in R&D engineering and project management (industry and services); and finally in consultancy and socio-economic research sectors involved in issues of scientific and technological innovation..