Why Innovative Design Requires New Scientific Foundations for Manageable Identities of Systems

International audience; When can we state that things are identical or different? This is a key issue in structuring humans' representations and making plausible predictions with potentially major implications, as demonstrated in high-tech industries such as those studied here. The identity of things is not a natural and absolute relationship just waiting to be stated once and for all. Rather, it is an artificial and short-lived one, relative to available knowledge or experience, and should be memorized as such using well-suited semantics. Standard rationality enables designers to manage consistent identities according to a fixed state of understanding only. If that state is updated to reflect current changes of things or environments coupled with innovation, they must adopt a relevant non standard rationality based on new scientific foundations.