Configuration des Entreprises & Construction de la Professionnalité des Ingénieurs

More and more, firms have to engage in uncertain technical innovations. The learning of new competences is becoming an important issue, which leads us to question the link between the dynamics of the firm and those of human resources. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, based on an international comparison, how the professionalism of engineers emerges in the dynamics of companies. A team from LEST (Maurice, Lanciano, Nohara, Silvestre) has been carrying out comparative research on the "technical function" in firms and on innovation processes for several years. Until now, they have mainly worked on the innovative dynamics of manufacturing sectors, their interest is now shifting to sectors producing immaterial goods. Thus, this paper deals with a research project on the software industry. For both France and Japan, it represents considerable challenges in terms of short- and medium-term competitiveness. However, it is poorly understood for several reasons: its contours are far from fixed; it occupies an ambiguous place between industry and service; it induces a new form of cooperation between the supplier and the client, an interweaving of the skills required by the production process. This comparative research therefore leads us to approach a sector that allows a certain displacement in relation to the study of the manufacturing industry, while continuing to ask the questions that arise in the latter. This continuity and a certain break with our past work constitute a backdrop to all our problematics.