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Empty Innovation

Causes and Consequences of Society's Obsession with Entrepreneurship and Growth

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  • Open Access
  • © 2023

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Overview

Authors:
  1. Olof Hallonsten

    1. Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

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  • A critical view on society’s current obsession with innovation, and an explanation of its origins and consequences
  • A theoretical and historical review of the role of innovation in current society and why it has gone astray
  • Questions the prevalent understanding of innovation in our society and explains how innovation really works
  • This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-v
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  2. The Innovation Society

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 1-13Open Access
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  3. From Forbidden to Cure-All

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 15-27Open Access
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  4. Economization

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 29-45Open Access
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  5. We’re All Entrepreneurs Now

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 47-59Open Access
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  6. Faster, Better, Stronger

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 61-79Open Access
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  7. Empty and Real Innovation

    • Olof Hallonsten
    Pages 81-95Open Access
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  8. Back Matter

    Pages 97-120
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Keywords

About this book

Innovation is generally viewed as something inherently good, a source of progress and prosperity in our society. But innovation can also have negative, unintended, and wasteful effects, if policies are misdirected and organizations pursue innovation to look good and convey a message, rather than to actually achieve improvements of technologies, services, and products. This book makes the case that innovation has become a buzzword, a political cure-all, and increasingly an empty phrase, and that this has become detrimental to innovation itself.


Governmental (and supra-governmental) innovation policy is often unrealistically phrased and shaped, and corporate innovation projects are not seldom meaningless acts of window-dressing. The book describes the problems this presents for society, organizations, and individuals, and seeks explanations for why it has come to be this way. Giving way to a more realistic view of what innovation really is, and how it can beaccomplished, the book develops a multifaceted sociological and historical argument where several complementary reasons for the prevalence of “empty innovation” are proposed. The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, and all those with an interest in the failures of current innovation strategies.


This is an open access book.

Reviews

"Empty Innovation by Olof Hallonsten provides a unique and important contribution to the current debate on innovation and entrepreneurship. This book argues persuasively that a large part of innovation activities in mature economies are in fact empty. Hallonsten offers explanations to this sad state of affairs that are grounded in a wide range of academic disciplines."—Magnus Henrekson, Professor and Senior Research Fellow, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, Stockholm.


"Empty innovation is anything but empty. Hallonsten's book is full of sobering thoughts about the increasing discrepancy between innovation talk and real innovation. A worthy corrective to the wasteful hoopla that distracts from valuable enterprise and a must read for entrepreneurship researchers and policy makers alike."
—Amar Bhidé, Thomas Schmidheiny Professor of International Business, Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts.


"Olof Hallonsten’s Empty Innovation takes on one of the most puzzling questions of our time: why is there so little real renewal and change, despite so much unanimously positive and uncritical talk about innovation everywhere? Scholars, policymakers, industry leaders and anyone interested in real development beyond Empty Innovation would benefit immensely from reading this thoughtprovoking, inquisitive and refreshingly contrarian contribution."

—Christian Sandström, Senior Associate Professor, Jönköping International Business School & the Ratio Institute, Stockholm.


Authors and Affiliations

  • Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Olof Hallonsten

About the author

Olof Hallonsten is a Senior Lecturer and Associate Professor at the Lund University School of Economics and Management, Sweden. He has published widely in books and journals, with a recent focus on critical studies on the interface of science and society. He has also worked as a consultant for Swedish governmental agencies and the European Commission.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: Empty Innovation

  • Book Subtitle: Causes and Consequences of Society's Obsession with Entrepreneurship and Growth

  • Authors: Olof Hallonsten

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-31479-7

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Business and Management, Business and Management (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-31478-0Published: 09 June 2023

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-31479-7Published: 08 June 2023

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: V, 120

  • Topics: Business and Management, general, Entrepreneurship, Industries

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