The Interdisciplinary Institute on Innovation is saddened to announce the passing of Michel Callon, on July 28th, 2025.
Michel Callon joined the Center for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI) at the École des Mines in the late 1960s, where he conducted his early research on controversies surrounding the electric vehicle project. He proposed his original vision of innovation phenomena through translation processes. Together with Bruno Latour, Madeleine Akrich, and John Law, he contributed to the shaping of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which was a major intellectual watershed in the field of Science and Technology Studies in the 1980s. His research on innovation continued in several directions, such as the study of the role of expertise in democracy. From the early 2000s onwards, he devoted himself to analyzing the functioning of markets, opening a new perspective that many French and foreign researchers would follow in his wake. Michel Callon headed the CSI from 1982 to 1994 and, during his career, held numerous advisory and expert positions with various organizations and institutions.
Michel Callon’s research has been a source of inspiration for i3 researchers, and for all those in France and abroad who have taken an interest in innovation phenomena. A great connoisseur of classical theories in economics of innovation and research policy, in dialogue with researchers in management and organization studies, he was able to show how a sociology of innovation could draw on these diverse disciplines and yet offer an original approach to the production of technosciences. Bridging all these approaches, he considered disciplinary boundaries as levers for scientific reflection rather than barriers to dialogue and sharing. Michel Callon had forged many links beyond the École des Mines with colleagues at Télécom Paris and the École Polytechnique, and the unifying nature of his research contributed to the climate that led to the creation of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation in 2013.
His colleagues at the CSI, as well as all the members of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Innovation, wish to pay tribute to his work and join his loved ones in mourning his passing.