The “Innovating Differently” research theme organized an off-site seminar on November 27, 2025. This i3 theme critically examines visions of innovation that are sometimes overly technocentric and growth-oriented, focusing on the resistance, controversies, and failures that reveal their blind spots. Based on initiatives led by a variety of actors, the theme explores forms of social, non-market, and non-technological innovation and the potential for social, political, and economic reorganization that these concrete experiments hold. In this context, i3 researchers visited the exhibition Flops ?! Oser, rater, innover on display at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris.
Bertrand Cousin (Head of the Exhibitions and Cultural Events Department) and Jean-Baptiste Taisne (museographer)—gave a guided tour of the exhibition. The i3 researchers discovered a multitude of failed innovations: Colgate lasagna, the DeLaurean car, the Minitel, plastic bicycles, Ariane V, pink pens for women, the Kodak EK-1 camera, the Wankel engine, scary children’s dolls, and many other objects. All these objects also reveal the many reasons why an innovation can fail, such as an accident, poor communication, or even price. The exhibition also shows that some innovations that were flops in their day—such as electric vehicles and videoconferencing—later became successes.
The exhibition also dedicates a space to Aramis, an automated mini-metro project developed between 1970 and 1987 by the RATP that was ultimately abandoned. This failure was analyzed by Bruno Latour, a researcher at the Center for the Sociology of Innovation between 1982 and 2006, in his book Aramis ou l’amour des techniques (1992). Another researcher, closely associated with i3’s research topics, was also important to the exhibition: Nicolas Nova. His book Les Flops technologiques – Comprendre les échecs pour innover (Technological Flops: Understanding Failures to Innovate) (2011) was an important source of inspiration, Bertrand and Jean-Baptiste told us.
The exhibition ends with contemporary objects such as dry toilets for apartments and heated contraceptive underwear for men—objects that invite the public to reflect on their future and continue their reflections beyond the exhibition.
The visit was followed by a discussion with Bertrand and Jean-Baptiste about the creation and behind-the-scenes aspects of the exhibition. Various topics were addressed: the public’s reception of the exhibition, the difference in how failure is perceived in different countries, the link between museums and research, the reluctance of some parties to lend objects for an exhibition on flops, how to reinterpret certain objects in the Musée des Arts et Métiers collection as “flops,” and what we can learn from failed innovations.
The tour and discussion around Flops ?! Oser, rater, innover was a real success and provided original food for thought within i3 on how to “innovate differently.”
Morgan Meyer and Alban Ouahab