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In order to develop and strengthen the innovation network, one must regularly agree to transform the project into a new form acceptable to new entrants. The adoption of an innovation thus goes hand in hand with an adaptation, or even a reinvention of the “product” (which (Gaglio 2011) summarized through the neologism “adaptation”). Moreover, recruiting or losing an actor leads to a new network, which is likely to reconfigure the project. At each stage, “the innovation is transformed, redefining its properties and its public” (Akrich et al. 1988b, p. 31). This approach does not prejudge the decisive role of any one actor (who may be quite ordinary: a prototypist, a salesperson, a supplier, a client, etc.), especially since his or her influence may vary considerably from one stage to another. Moreover, many innovation trajectories develop despite the exit of the inventor’s network or of a key player from the beginning.

It is thus necessary to avoid the trap of reconstruction in the form of a success story, with its classic ingredients: passionate and determined innovators; their promising intuitions stubbornly propagated toward a demand (initially reticent, then benevolent); a concept or product that is “already there” that only needs to be refined to overcome technical difficulties or customer reticence, etc. However, even to understand a posteriori a success story, one must try to refuse a finalistic explanation: the receiving society, the convinced market, the controlled efficiency or profitability. “It is impossible to use the end of the story to explain its beginning and its course” (Latour et al. 1991, p. 462). It is therefore a question of starting again from the beginning of the story, in a pragmatic way, in order to describe and understand its extensions, its reversals and its adhesions; that is to say, “to explain its elaboration without assuming it to be acquired” (Latour and Callon 1990, p. 23). A first principle of symmetry follows from this: to consider the innovation under construction, without prejudging its success or failure (which must be explained in the same way), which Trabal (1999) has underlined the importance of in the sports sector. Hence the interest of innovation narratives in process studies (innovation in the making) (Hoholm and Araujo 2011), a trend that invites us to look at trajectories that are still unstable, or in the process of stabilization, rather than at the already stabilized products and the formalized collectives that underlie them. Hence the importance of works that are interested in this way in innovations that have not met their market or penetrated society (Latour 1992). This perspective can be compared with the contributions of Latour (1989), who very early on was sensitive to science in action, that is to say in the process of being made. It is indeed a way of capturing and then showing the experiences and actions of all stakeholders in the face of opportunities, uncertainties, disagreements and trade-offs to be made (Hoholm and Araujo 2011).