4. Guaranteeing robustness

This is an important question to address when faced with the issues of designing and implementing an innovation - a technological one, in most cases. This question concerns robustness, or to put the debate in its proper perspective, the loss or gain in robustness that an innovation is capable of generating. It is often this notion of relativity that needs to be emphasized. The risks and precariousness of an existing process are often accepted as low, because of the community's knowledge of it.

While many will hesitate or even reject any idea of innovation, invoking the sacrosanct "precautionary principle", others, in a position described as intermediate, will try to gain acceptance for the postulate that any novelty will imply a loss of robustness, all the more so as it is far removed from known and used fields. So we need to identify potential risks, assess how...