Socio-technical analysis of the survival-development phase of innovative business creation projects.

Summary The individual-project couple is at the heart of a dynamic entrepreneurial system in continuous interaction with its environment. In order to ensure its survival and development, the creator is regularly led to federate around him a network of actors that allows to feed this system with energy and resources that it lacks. The research question we are trying to answer in this work is the following: In a complex and dynamic entrepreneurial situation, how does an entrepreneur build and develop his network, in order to acquire the resources necessary for the success-development of his innovative entrepreneurial project? In order to answer this question, we have mobilized the actor-network theory (Callon and Latour, 1986) as the methodology that guides our research. According to this theory, the success of an innovation is not linked solely to the genius of an individual, nor to the intrinsic value of his or her project, but is above all the result of an effort provided by an unprecedented association of actors (human and non-human) that gradually gathers around the individual/project couple. By adopting a qualitative, longitudinal methodology, we have followed, over a period of two years, the dynamics of the construction of the entrepreneurial network of six innovative business creation projects. We paid particular attention to the role of technical artifacts in our work.