| A simple query on Google shows that more than 400 million pages dealing with innovation are available for reading. Innovation has got a place that goes well beyond organizations and affects the whole society. One only has to read political or economic discourses in France, making innovation an indispensable recourse for growth. This dogma around innovation, sometimes associated with growth sometimes with progress, has been questioned for some 15 years (Alter, 2002) if not criticized (Birkinshaw et al., 2011). For a long time in France, innovation was rhyming with technology (Godet et al., 2010). There is a translation from an academic point of view. The relational processes around innovation, and even the innovation linked to relationships, are still quantitatively minor; according to Crossan and Apaydin (2010), out of the 1,000 articles written on innovation per year only 4 per cent focus on describing the processes around innovation and less than 3 per cent deal with organizational administrative innovation. To paraphrase Chanlat (1990), do relationships constitute the “forgotten dimensions” of innovation? This seems more surprising given that since the mid-2000s many researchers have wanted to promote innovations centred on individuals and their relationships. We can cite, for example, Gary Hamel at Harvard or Birkinshaw at the London School of Economics. This interest goes hand in hand with research on an “unleashed” enterprise (Getz and Carney, 2012), where the individual would be at the core of a particularly informal innovation where creativity and the search for productivity would go through processes and tools that are not necessarily technological but rather relational. Following their aftermath, since 2012, we have noticed a resurgence of interest in the community of management science researchers for the notions of organizational innovation (e.g. a special issue of the Revue Française de Gestion in 2013) or management (Damanpour and Aravind, 2012). Our theoretical article returns initially to the difficulty of speaking about innovation. We then establish a chronology and a definition of the innovations linked to relations (administrative innovation, organizational innovation, managerial innovation). |