Imad Haraoubia

Composition of the Jury

Abstract

The pursuit of competitiveness is a key concern for stakeholders (entrepreneurs, startups, etc.) facing a dynamic and uncertain environment. These stakeholders primarily seek to be more responsive to their environment in order to ensure their sustainability and to expand at the local, national, and international levels. This has led to much discussion on developing new collaborative strategies between companies. This collaboration will create greater synergies, aiming to foster a shared commitment to improvement through the sharing and exchange of knowledge and expertise, while simultaneously striving to enhance their performance. The collaborative economy has emerged as a new socio-economic model and a dynamic sector, giving rise to new shared spaces such as coworking spaces, Fab Labs, and makerspaces. These spaces rely on a unique and diverse ecosystem, offering the potential for creating skilled jobs and revitalizing the local economy. Numerous initiatives have been implemented to capitalize on the strong growth offered by the dynamic and innovative digital sector. To this end, the French Tech initiative was launched on November 27, 2013, with the aim of supporting local entrepreneurial activity and assisting entrepreneurs and startups in their development and growth within a given region. The objective of the French Tech initiative is to bring together a number of stakeholders in the digital field in order to create collective dynamics across all the regions awarded the French Tech label. Given this situation, we focused on the role of companies/startups within a region supported by the "French Tech" initiative. Theoretical concepts are employed to achieve the assigned research objectives, such as the concept of the institutional field and its components (institutional work and institutional actors), the concept of field-shaping events, and the notion of inter-organizational collaboration processes. The aim of this research is to analyze how actors organize themselves within an institutional field. More specifically, we focus on mapping and characterizing this institutional field. The research also aims to identify the nature and function of events within this field in order to determine minor and major events and the various institutional processes generated by them. Finally, the research will allow us to analyze the relationship between the institutional processes generated by these events and the emergence of inter-organizational collaboration. The study of the concept of an institutional field aims to analyze the networks of actors and their interactions within a territory supported by French Tech. In this context, elements related to the institutional field are examined to highlight their multiple definitions and their interaction with our French Tech case study. The concept of a field-shaping event was used to analyze and study the development and structuring of the institutional field. The concept of inter-organizational collaboration processes was used to analyze collaboration processes and study the various interactions between actors within an institutional field, thereby identifying the influencing factors that shape the dynamics of institutional fields through the notion of an event.