• In the Lyon-Ecully technopolis: ISEOR
  First Research Enterprise in MANAGEMENT ENGINEERING

ISEOR is one of the major French research teams in organizational Management : it develops a fundamental concept of management of living organizations (bio-management).

The ISEOR has invested more than 1600,000 hours of research work in its innovative management pilot projects - more than 600 individuals, teachers, students and highly qualified practitioners have been trained by carrying out researches in this institute. It has attained a prominent position amongst French research teams and constitutes today a center and network of more than 125 fully active researchers.

The ISEOR is approached by enterprises to which it offers a methodology based on two conceptual frameworks it has set up:
- the socio-economic theory of management
- the theory of intervention in enterprises
- the socio-economic management tools which make it possible to bring tangible and measurable results to enterprises.

The very strong demand from enterprises, small and medium-sized firms, large companies, public service organization, and state-owned companies, allow this research to be self financed in an original way, thanks to the contracts signed with the users. The essential scientific and economic independence of the ISEOR approach is thus secured so as to ensure a level of fundamental research which can sustain competition internationally and attract academics and practitioners in anglo-saxon countries.

• An enterprise of the third millennium focused on research, creation and innovation.
  
  A contractual research in the service of the future of firms and organizations.
  A fundamental research to promote the scientific comprehension of current and prospective realities.
  The creation of stimulative concepts, methods and tools for a live management of organizations and projects.

• Instrumenting a new field of knowledge: engineering of the intangible

An innovative management? What for?

The environment challenges the enterprise through:

The constructive answer of the enterprise implies:

The ISEOR Research laboratory.

So as to overcome the contemplative voyeurism of the amateurish researchers within firms:

The ISEOR team is constantly interactive switching between the pilot plants and the ISEOR headquarters. Each actor-researcher has everyday direct access to actual situations involving genuine administrative and managerial problems, and real-life decision making and, in return, builds up concepts and management engineering tools pertinent at the level of scientific development and in terms of usefulness for the firms. This interaction is an invaluable source for the elicitation of new scientific knowledge: thus was born the cognitive interactivity principle.

A mission and a "Raison d'être":

Company management entails vital consequences for everybody: it deserves a genuine type of scientific research based, as is the case in successfull scientific domains, on rigorous observation and duly measured life-size and repicated experiments. So, solid unique database have been constructed.

• A doctrin : consider the firm or organization as a living observable and evolutionary being
  

• Three persistent preoccupations which stimulate SCIENTIFIC QUALITY

1. Build up pertinent and verifiable representations of what constitutes the ACTUALITY of companies and organizations management by multiplying scientific evaluations with the players in the field (fighting against bookish academicism and sterile scholasticism).

2. Try out again and again concepts and tools before considering as proved any kind of assertion (fighting against unwarranted allegations burdening social sciences).

3. Give more importance to studying changes rather than past or present phenomena within the firm : a strategic vision of the enterprise can be clarified by resorting to its past but, in substance, the company strategy does not draw on history but on CREATION/INNOVATION/PROSPECTIVE (fighting against static representations which can not propel the company at reasonable speed)