Undertaking Ingenuity in Work and Labor Management

The session will offer historical perception on ingenuity as one of the discreet foundations of innovation. It is this ability to cleverly combine expertise and skill: mobilize knowledge to improve know-how (savoir-faire) and vice versa. Ingenuity is part of the common practices of “ordinary people” observed by Michel de Certeau and his team in the 1970s. It is “another form of creativity hidden in a subtle entanglement of silent and effective tricks, by which everyone invents their “own way” of making things through the forest of imposed products”. In the workplace, it is a form of anticipation of the difficulty of tasks, the sign of the persistence of dexterity and know-how that contribute to technological development. Is the practitioner’s ingenuity in work opposed to the management of labor? How is it possible to build a history of ingenuity at work, different consultant’ recipes in Human Resources management?