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The socio-technical approach nevertheless sometimes struggles to shed light on what, from a normative point of view, makes possible (favors, hinders, weakens, etc.) the associations between actors in innovation. Quéré (1989) was quick to point out this limit on the clearance of regulations (collective norms, interpersonal relations) and regularities (structure). However, innovation activities can be considered as dependent on and determined by different kinds of social characteristics.

For example, in line with the sociology of networks developed by the new economic sociology (Cochoy and Grossetti 2008), it is possible to take better account of the dynamics of pairing between actors. Grossetti (2006) suggests strengthening “the explicitness of what makes up the network, the relationships”, including in innovative activities (innovation networks, business creation) (Grossetti 2008a, 2008b; Grossetti and Barthe 2008). The first phases of innovation are thus characterized by a strong dependence on prior interpersonal relationships (we speak of social embedding). However, the expansion of the network will inevitably (and sometimes abruptly) involve enrolling new actors by escaping from personal relationships, sometimes by detaching oneself from one’s “close friends” (known as decoupling). This allows us to understand the difficulties in making a success of switching between the exploration and exploitation of an innovation, or the importance of the many mediation mechanisms (objects and professionals involved in putting people in touch with each other) that proliferate around innovation activities: clusters, incubators, economic agencies, directories, etc. This interpretive framework thus is drawn upon to understand the role and changing weight of interpersonal relationships in an innovation trajectory of a novel sliding device (Hallé and Boutroy 2017).