Dynamics and configuration(s) of the evolution of high-tech business creation projects. Development and contingency. Restitution of a process from a research-intervention: the case of a high-tech innovation from invention to exploitation.

Summary The thesis aims to explain the dynamics of the evolution of high-tech business creation projects through the different configurations taken by technological and organizational development. The literature review in the field of technological entrepreneurship has shown a great wealth of explanatory factors of the evolution of the projects of creation of companies but also deficiencies of the role allotted to technology which confer it a status of artifact and not that of process with whole share. A conceptual approach to the creation of a high-tech company based on the theory of the network actor makes it possible to go beyond deterministic approaches in order to focus on the joint development of the technology and the organization. The case of a high-tech innovation from invention to exploitation is analyzed in depth using a research-intervention approach. The analysis leads to the elaboration of a decision support tool (the intervention device) and a dynamic model of the creation of the high-tech company different from those presented in the entrepreneurial literature. The main contributions lie in the assistance to strategic decision making and to the construction of the organization. This assistance, initially based on intervention practices, has gradually evolved into a collective learning process based on a rational model of the construction of the technological enterprise, promoting the emergence of new knowledge that can be shared and sustained over time.