The Innovation Odyssey: Lessons from an Impossible Project

Affordable is not typically the first adjective used to describe an electric automobile. This book traces the history of an affordable electric car, from its genesis to its marketing. This history is more than a singular adventure. It is the analysis of a project that allows us to understand the key issues of strategy and management of contemporary innovation.

The book features in lessons in:

• Strategy revealing the complexity of international product development and the conditions for its implementation in today’s fragmented world
• Project management showing what is required to succeed in the a priori impossible challenge of a design within an alliance between five partners from four different countries
• Innovation demonstrating that the electrification of mobility can be combined with affordable prices
• Industrial policy using the emblematic domain of electric vehicles to illustrate the major role of public authorities in technology, the future direction of this role, and the importance in the competition between Western and Chinese industries
• Intrapreneurship showing that a start-up is not the only context in which it is possible to attempt and experience breakthroughs.

Christophe Midler, Emeritus Research Director at the Centre de Recherche en Gestion (Management Research Center), National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and Ecole polytechnique, and member of the Académie des technologies, is internationally recognized in the fi eld of project and innovation management.

Marc Alochet, an engineer by training, has spent his entire career in industry. Most of it was spent at Renault, where he held various functions and positions in product and process engineering. In 2017, he joined the Management Research Center of École Polytechnique (CRG) to do a thesis dedicated to the impacts of electrifi cation on the automotive industry, which was defended in 2020 (Technological Disruptions and Dynamics of an Industry, the Case of Electro mobility). Since then, he has been working at CRG on the future of the automotive industry under the eff ects of the emergence of electric, self-driving, and connected vehicles, as well as new mobility services.

Christophe de Charentenay, also an engineer by training (Ponts et Chaussées, 1987) and an MBA graduate from the Collège des Ingénieurs, has developed his career along two lines: in education as deputy director, then administrator of the Collège des Ingénieurs, and as a lecturer at Tsinghua University and the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne; and in the nuclear, steel, and automotive industries for 16 years at Renault.