Understanding the emergence of unknown domains of expertise in established firms: learnings from Renault's collaboration with industrial management scholars since the 1950's

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The paper studies the emergence of unknown domain of expertise in an established French technological firm with a strong organization of experts. The research is built on a quantitative and qualitative longitudinal research partnership with Renault (global car manufacturer). This research highlights 4 main results: Firstly, in the case of an industrial company like Renault, it took around 29 years to constitute the first domains of expertise, but since then, new domains have been formalized in just a decade. In the case of emergent domains of expertise, we do not yet know how long will be needed for them to be fully institutionalized. In this way (second result), external peer's community can acknowledge the expertise of a company, and not only of an expert. Thirdly, all the experts in industries are not strategic and exact & experimental scientific or technical expert, they can also be experts in social sciences, and strategic for the other experts instead of just for the company. Finally, research collaborations are a way to create and reinforce a domain of expertise, both for an expert and for the company.