The integration of a sustainable development gait (SD) in the organizations implies, beyond the incentives, structured and structuring methods. These methods that we could name tools of implementation of SD are oriented toward a common objective: the global performance. Today very few methods are proposed to the societies of engineering in order to reach this global performance. It is probably due to the typological specificities of this type of organization. In point of fact, these engineering enterprises are quite atypical because they are shared between two universes which are the client (for instance pharmaceutical industry) and a significant number of complex subcontractors (SC). In this context, we approach our topic of research: the enterprise must prove that it is “economically viable, socially responsible and environmental healthy” (Quairel-Lanoizelee 2004), even beyond its own frontiers. But the answer to society’s expectations is also an element of the enterprise’s economic strategy. That is why, our idea is to suggest methodologies that are applicable to the engineering profession, and therefore could be adapted to all types of engineering enterprises, so that it can integrate a voluntary gait for SD by The Social Responsibility (SR). The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is developing an international standard in order to provide guidelines for adopting and disseminating social responsibility: ISO 26000, which was published in 2010. In our research we have considered that the SR will play a double role, as reformer of the classical practices of project management as well as a tool that could bring SD strategy inside and outside the engineering organization. The general idea is to conceive a new approach of the enterprise’s management philosophy, disinterested from the unique profit notion. This brings us to think about another dimension of the enterprise’s performance. This project lead us to asking the following question: is it possible to manage an engineering project by including the SR approach in classical methodology of project management?By a methodology of action-research and specifically intervention-research (I-R), we are going to build our investigation about an international engineering company, which has as pharmaceutical engineering activity. The objective is to analyze, and to understand the specificities of engineering enterprise’s model in order to known if it is possible to change this model by developing a new project management approach based on the SR and strategy innovation. The innovating methodology that we developed must allow us to integrate a gait of SR within the best practice of engineering project. In conclusion, the integration tool of a gait of SR which is today on the stage of prototype, built on ISO 26000 norms and on the experimental norm Afnor X30-029 basis, allowed us to develop the pharmaceutical engineering’s profession, by moving from the standard engineering best practice to the social responsible engineering best practice, for a sustainable development goal.
Innovation by social responsibility in engineering and project management : Case of pharmaceutical engineering