Accompanying the maturation of concepts within eco-innovation processes: proposal of the MIRAS method, to help overcome collective fixations and explore stakeholder networks.

Summary In an eco-innovation approach, companies seek to invent and implement new, more sustainable activities that sometimes break with their existing practices, and that lead to more or less significant changes in their offers, their business model, and sometimes in their entire ecosystem. Faced with such challenges and associated dynamics that are often complex in nature, whether technical, economic, social, legal, political, etc., the company and the stakeholders of the emerging project do not always seem to be able to consciously move away from existing cognitive frameworks to explore alternatives that are in line with the initial ambitions of an eco-innovation project. The work presented here focuses on the maturation phase of eco-innovation concepts and seeks to develop support methods to avoid or overcome such situations, known as "collective fixation".The methodological approach is based on a research-action carried out within the support organization Apesa and structured in two steps:- The analysis of three cases of eco-innovation projects allowed us to characterize the problematic of support practices and more precisely the collective fixations present during the maturation of concepts. The MIRAS method proposes a panel of animation tools intended for the actors of the accompaniment to help the project groups during the phases of maturation of their concept and their potential of sustainability by aiming at a certain balance of the economic - environmental - social triptych.) In this perspective, MIRAS aims to adopt a systemic thinking, which is not only centered on the company but which reconsiders all the dimensions of the "extended network of stakeholders".