Territorial social responsibility: a lever for managerial innovation

Managerial innovation refers to organizational, decision-making, and relational transformations implemented to sustainably improve organizational performance. Managerial innovation focuses on governance models, forms of coordination, work practices, and mechanisms for mobilizing stakeholders around shared objectives. It offers an opportunity to adopt a new approach to fostering more responsible management, as it goes beyond the project’s end goal to promote new tools for managing organizations that are becoming increasingly non-traditional. New forms of organization, such as competitiveness clusters and regional economic cooperation clusters, highlight the challenges of aligning objectives within a multi-stakeholder, multi-issue framework and of engaging all stakeholders. Competitiveness clusters are ecosystems that bring together actors (companies, research laboratories, training organizations, associations, etc.) from a given sector to support them in achieving innovation—primarily technological in nature. Regional economic cooperation clusters (PTCE) are focused on the social and solidarity economy and serve as catalysts for social innovation. The first approach promotes collaborative innovation, while the second emphasizes cooperation. Both face challenges related to this multifaceted approach to the objectives mentioned earlier. Examining these two contexts also helps identify opportunities to shift from collaboration to cooperation, using managerial innovation as a lever. While collaboration refers to ad hoc coordination among actors around compatible objectives, cooperation involves a more integrated dynamic, characterized by interdependence, trust, a shared vision, and the pooling of resources. Through several case studies, the article highlights the tensions that characterize territorial cooperative projects. These tensions are not negative, as it is precisely through their manifestations that it becomes possible to develop management tools designed as potential artifacts to facilitate action. These tools are inspired by corporate social responsibility and take several dimensions into account. The article also draws on the concept of an “empowering territory,” which involves identifying the resources present in the territory, equipping stakeholders with the capacity to harness them, and simultaneously developing their capacity for action—a process that is a potential source of managerial innovation.