The breath of Creativity within SMEs/SMI organisation : from the inner potential to the competitive intelligence
Résumé
SMEs and SMIs create most of our national wealth, create most of our jobs and make more than half the productive investments in our country. Although, thanks to their size, their history and their flexibility, they are often the melting pot for innovation and sources of information coveted by competitors, in creative project mode, it is the player within a structured organisation, as the one that uses their products, that has a major role to play in information management and the emergence of new ideas. The importance of strategic monitoring and economic intelligence in their development, diversification, innovation and decision-making processes no longer needs to be demonstrated.
However, although the defensive aspect has become more familiar, the offensive aspect is often restricted to gathering and processing information and introducing a monitoring process. The offensive wing of economic intelligence, as we see it in our context, takes creativity as a means of conveying competitive intelligence and advertising techniques that may contribute to the definition and subsequent integration of an offensive model within SMEs and SMIs. This model would be a model which is no longer the prerogative of monitoring services alone, but is within reach of each company player such that it becomes a source of diversification, innovation and decision making.
We refer to the sociology of the network player or translation sociology developed by Latour, Callon & Latour (1991 and following), and to the recent proposals that we have called “reverse creativity” or the new uses and new imagined or misappropriated uses of products which constitute a relevant proposal. We shall build on the Nonaka and Takeuchi knowledge creation method (1997) which supports the scenario in which the employee is the main player in the company since he possesses knowledge, processes information and interacts with its structure in order to cause new proposals to emerge. Finally, we will analyse the creative advertising techniques, the “disruption technique”, in particular, for which we can thank the advertiser, Jean Marie Dru (1996 & 2003), and we will attempt to demonstrate that a model which associates the fields of knowledge and creativity, shall, in fact, be furthering the tactical and strategic objectives of the company.