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ABSTRACT
The potential relationships between innovation and sustainability processes, in engineering education, is neither obvious nor simple, especially when innovation, generally speaking, is promoted regardless of sustainability. We used UniLaSalle (In January 2016, the ‘Institut Polytechnique LaSalle Beauvais’, a French engineering school, merged with another higher education engineering school (ESITPA, Rouen). Both campuses (Beauvais and Rouen) have a common name: UniLaSalle (www.unilasalle.fr). As the interview began during 2015, this article only describes the situation of the Beauvais campus.) as a ‘living Lab’ to identify and analyse the reasons for the integration of innovation and Sustainable Development (SD) in training programmes. The aim is to explore, in a perception and reflective approach, how SD can be understood as a driver for specific innovation attitudes in higher education engineering school. This paper adopts an empirical approach based on a qualitative study, using NVivo 9 software to analyse non-numerical data. Our research suggests that SD can be a structural driver for innovation if it is integrated in a transdisciplinarity approach and not just as a discipline per se.
Acknowledgments
We thank Gaëlle Kotbi, Associate Professor at UniLaSalle, for her participation in the reflection of the guide interview, Marie Chedru, Associate Professor at UniLaSalle, and Sylvie Lupton, Associate Professor at UniLaSalle, for the second reading and revision of the final version. We also thank all interviewees for providing the time to answer our questions; these answers have enriched the empirical part of this research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Fatma Fourati-Jamoussi, Associate Professor in Marketing and Strategic Intelligence at UniLaSalle, PhD. in Management Sciences at the University Paris Dauphine. Member of INTERACT Research Unit UP 2018.C102 (Innovation Territoire Agriculture et Agroindustrie, Connaissance et Technologie). She teaches mainly the Economic and Business Intelligence. Her research interests concern the evaluation of business intelligence tools, and technology intelligence process, Sustainable Development in Higher Engineering Education.
Michel J.F. Dubois, Expert in Agriculture Sciences at UniLaSalle, PhD in Plant Molecular Biology and in Philosophy and Habilitation to supervise research (HDR). Member of INTERACT Research Unit UP 2018.C102 (Innovation Territoire Agriculture et Agroindustrie, Connaissance et Technologie). He teaches Agriculture History and its challenges of today, Epistemology, History of technology. His main domains are Sustainable Development and Human and Technology Relationships in Agriculture.
Maxime Agnès, Assignment Manager for Sustainable Development at UniLaSalle, Sustainable Development Direction. Engineer (MSc in Agriculture), he is responsible for the implementation of the sustainable development. He also works in network with other education institutions in order to share good practices and to build a SD label. Finally he is involved in SD lessons and supervises student projects.
Valérie Leroux, Vice-President at UniLaSalle, PhD. in Management Sciences. Member of INTERACT Research Unit. Her field interests deal with strategy, finance and entrepreneurship especially in agrifood sector and for SME’s.
Loïc Sauvée, Professor in Management Sciences at UniLaSalle, PhD and Habilitation to supervise research (HDR), Head of INTERACT Research Unit UP 2018.C102 (Innovation Territoire Agriculture et Agroindustrie, Connaissance et Technologie) and expert in applied social sciences, Scientific Direction. His teaching fields are : business organisation and maketing in agrifood sectors. His research fields are : governance of innovation processes in agrifood competitiveness cluster, alignment of quality management systems in agrifood chains and networks, implementation of CSR in food SMEs, dynamics of network governance ; member of editorial board of the Journal on Chain and Network Science.
Notes
2. In Geology, Agriculture or Food and Health curricula, the challenge of SD is integrated in specific pluridisciplinarity courses which describe the challenges from SD requirements in their discipline.
3. The PICAR-T Research Unit is now called INTERACT (Innovation, Territory, Agriculture and Food-industry, Knowledge and Technology Unit) since 2016.