Shared inventions and competitive innovations: New approaches

The concepts of “shared invention” and “competitive innovation” have sometimes been used in areas such as the economics and management of inventions and innovations, the industrial economy and the history of technologies. Analyzing the available literature, this article will offer a new approach to these concepts and their interrelationships. The concept of shared invention will be defined as a set of knowledge of the actors gathered in shared intelligences and social dynamics developing the coherence of these inventions and the reinvention of old techniques. The concept of competitive innovation will be defined by associations of experiences of certain actors motivated by social dynamics promoting competition and seeking to complement existing inventions by building their competitive forces. To be coherent, these shared inventions and these competitive innovations will also be defined by trajectories that allow us to go beyond their singularities in order to effectively achieve these sharing and competitions. JEL Codes: O3, L, A10