A field test and its displacements. Accounting for an experimental mode of industrial innovation

Abstract

In June 2012, the French car company Renault turned Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, a town on the outskirts of Paris, into a test and demonstration laboratory. The company introduced a fleet of 50 electric cars as part of a car-sharing system without fixed stations called Twizy Way. This scheme was a component of the manufacturer’s development strategy for the electric car market. This paper analyses this initiative in order to account for an experimental mode of industrial innovation. Characterised by the use of sociotechnical instruments in order to explore social and technical uncertainties and produce public demonstrations, this experimental mode is based on various kinds of experiments. Building on Science and Technology Studies and Actor Network Theory, this paper discusses two of them, which are in the same time two propositions for the organisation of codesign: a planned field test designed by Renault; and the collection of inquiries that resulted from the extension of the number of experimenters. These descriptions point to the analytical interest of the study of experimental trajectories in public and private interventions related to industrial projects, particularly in situations where the scope of the involved actors is not pre-given.

Keywords:

• urban laboratory
• car-sharing
• industrial innovation
• experiments
• actor network theory

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on the MEX-VEL project, funded by Renault in 2012–2014. We thank Romain Badouard, with whom we conducted this project, as well as the special issue editors and the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Martin Tironi’s involvement in the writing of this paper has been supported by the Chilean National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development’s (FONDECYT NO 11140042) research project: ‘Configuring smart spaces and users: A socio-technical research about practices, devices and discourses on “Smart Cities” in Chile’.

Notes

1. See e.g. in the case of public participation in science, Callon et al. (2009).

2. Part of the literature on smart cities is characterised by such a divide. See for example Campbell (2012) for the first type of narrative and Vanolo (2014) for the second one.

3. Our study relies on semi-structured interviews conducted between April and August 2013 with Renault’s officials in charge of designing the Twizy Way project and people from Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines who participated in the experiment. We also carried out ethnographic observations with various actors of the service, including the people in charge of delivering and maintaining the cars, supervision officers as well as a member of Renault’s staff.

4. The equivalence drawn here between the growth of the electric car market and the development of car-sharing is regularly used within Renault. We do not attempt to examine it here.

5. We use the expression ‘local authorities’ to describe the council in charge of the administration of the Saint-Quentin communauté de communes.

6. For instance, we observed 16 cars used during a half-day of observation. Eleven of them were used by users and five by jockeys. The day before, 14 out of 64 rides had been made by jockeys.

7. During an interview, the jockeys’ supervisor said that the maximal time it would allow for a car to be immobile was three days (Saint-Quentin, January 2014).

8. ‘Renault calls on Keymoov to operate the Twizy Way car-sharing service in Saint-Quentin en Yvelines’, press release, 24 September 2013.