Keywords

Introduction

How do we explain the direction of innovation? In the early 1990s, this was one of the key questions in the field of innovation studies, which I also pursued in my own research at the time. It was a novel question since traditionally, innovation studies had endeavored to explain the speed of innovation. In my research, I followed the role of expectations in innovation in order to contribute to this and other new questions in the field of innovation studies. In this chapter, I will elaborate on how a casual reading of the work of the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) spawned a breakthrough in my thinking on the subject matter. While his ideas on life as a drama first appeared as an interesting but not so relevant detour adjacent to the core of my research, it forged a crucial reversal in my research on expectations in technology. This reversal, in turn, helped me to formulate a “sociology of expectations” as a novel approach to innovation studies. My primary claim, thus, is that interdisciplinary detours may prove decisive.

In this chapter, I will first sketch the agenda of innovation studies in the early 1990s and introduce the question of direction of innovation. Then I will turn to my reading of Ortega y Gasset and its conceptual implications for my research on expectations. I will also reflect on the conditions for this fortunate philosophical detour and what it says about the intellectual adventure of interdisciplinarity.

Innovation studies is a scholarly field investigating how technological innovations are developed and used (Fagerberg & Verspagen, 2009). There is a strong emphasis on what happens within firms that depend on innovation for their ability to compete. Many firms have large departments for Research and Development (R&D) with budgets for this so-called private research that are comparable to those of public research at universities. Industrial firms are interested in the success factors of innovation projects, as their success is notoriously difficult to predict and manage. Likewise, governments are interested in the general conditions that help innovation, hoping to promote a competitive national economy. Within the field of innovation studies, there is also interest in the consequences of technologies and the societal meaning of innovation in economic, social, and cultural terms.

Innovation Studies and the Problem of Direction

Until the 1980s, the central question in innovation studies was to explain the pace of innovation: how to foster innovation processes in firms and gauge how quickly innovations would spread in society. Since the 1960s, the standard approach has been to follow the example set by Everett Rogers (2003). In Diffusion of Innovations, originally published in 1962, Rogers presented a model of the spread of innovations in society, which entailed a slow uptake in the beginning followed by a steady increase and a slowing down once “saturation” was reached. In many cases, the introduction of new technologies indeed follows this pattern. Television sets or mobile phones, for instance, were initially rare and only used by “early adopters.” Gradually, more and more customers followed, with numbers increasing very quickly but then later slowing down. Eventually, when almost every household had a television set or several mobile phones, one could speak of saturation. In Roger’s model, the spread of many new technologies in society is captured in an S curve, mathematically expressed with a logistic function. His model of the diffusion of technologies was inspired by studies on mass communication about the spreading of influential ideas. In his seminal study, Rogers also distinguished between categories of users, ranging from “early adopters” to “late adopters” or “laggards.” The derogatory nature of the latter term suggests a pro-innovation bias.

In the 1980s, the approach to technologies as gradually diffusing into society was challenged by different voices. One strand of new questions came from the philosophy of science and the history of technology. Here, the new impetus was to explain the particular design of a technology. It was no longer seen as sufficient to take the form of a new technology for granted and to only study its adoption by society. The aim was now to open the “black box” of technology, thanks to a new turn in the philosophy of science based on Thomas Kuhn’s work (1962) about the seventeenth-century scientific revolution. Kuhn showed that the fate of scientific truths is linked to how communities of scientists think and work. Scientific theories and claims are not in and of themselves true or not, he showed, but can only be understood as a “paradigm,” that is, a particular way of seeing reality. When paradigms shift, such as during the scientific revolution when the empirical method became the dominant approach, the direction of science changes as well. It follows, then, that the direction of scientific progress can be explained by looking at scientists’ choices. This is as true for “bad” science, such as the infamous genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko underpinning Soviet agricultural policies, as much as it is for “good” science, like James Watson’s and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

Some scholars extended these new questions in the philosophy of science to the study of technology and asked: Why do engineers and firms make particular choices? Why are new technologies seen as “working”? Trevor Pinch and Wiebe Bijker’s study (1984) on the development of bicycles at the end of the nineteenth century, for instance, examined how the bicycle acquired its particular shape—as a contraption with two equally sized rubber-tire wheels connected by a chain with pedals between them. Pinch and Bijker studied the diversity of early bicycle designs, which scarcely resembled the modern bicycle. Instead, they discovered an astonishing range of models with wheels that ranged from small to large, with pedals and saddles in different places. These were contenders with their own strong and weak points, at least in the eyes of the various beholders, which Pinch and Bijker termed “interpretative flexibility.” This fluid situation continued for several decades, until eventually the diversity of models was replaced by the one we today associate with the bicycle. The direction of innovation was thus explained as a societal struggle between meanings attributed to particular versions of a technology.

Another novel strand in the field of innovation studies was evolutionary economics, with Richard Nelson, Sidney Winter (1977), and Giovanni Dosi et al. (1988) as its key figures. While mainstream economics tends to see innovation as an external, exogenous factor, this new strand of research introduced the idea of interpreting innovation as an economic phenomenon. Nelson and Winter have argued that innovation is one of the ways that firms compete, though it does not always guarantee success. Innovation, they emphasized, is not an outcome of calculable optimization but an inherently uncertain process. Nelson and Winter proposed an evolutionary model of variation and selection: firms launch various designs (variations) that compete in the market (selection). Unlike the biological process, however, variations are not random and selection is not blind. Firms do not innovate randomly but structure their search processes through routines and heuristics in their production of variations; likewise, markets are influenced by marketing efforts and lobbying strategies. The direction of innovation, thus, can be explained by carefully following the routines, heuristics, and attempts to shape markets.

These new strands in innovation studies, in turn, prompted a new question: How do we account for the direction of innovation? These were questions about why scientists, engineers, and firms make particular choices. Sociological studies explained how new technologies take shape through a battle of meanings. Evolutionary economics pointed to the role of routines within organizations and the importance of heuristics. The common idea was that under conditions of uncertainty, hopes about future success would guide researchers and firms in their search activities.

Reading Ortega y Gasset

When historians, sociologists, and economists opened the “black box of technology,” they began to raise new questions. What choices do engineers and firms make? Which designs promise to be successful? How should the very processes of innovation be understood? This was the departure point of my research in the 1990s; from there, I decided to study the role of expectations in the development of technology. The idea was that engineers and firms would relate their choices to expectations of future success. My research was exploratory, conceptual, and empirical in character. In my conceptual exploration, I had been reading into works of evolutionary economics, science studies, and organization studies. In my empirical explorations, I followed scientists and engineers and attended their exhibitions, conferences, and classroom lectures. I delved into their world and probed their efforts; my former training in physics was helpful for this purpose.

During my research, I took up the habit of a regular Friday afternoon visit to the library to browse and nurture myself with novel, amusing, and intriguing ideas. These exercises were not goal-oriented but motivated by curiosity. I simply allowed myself to follow traces that appeared interesting. The ethnographer Paul Rock (1979) once called this the AHFA method, or Ad Hoc Fumbling Around. In this way, I read about architecture, sports, the history of technology, or cultural criticism—and not necessarily the most recent publications. I also came across the work of José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher with a poetic name. I read his essay “Man the Technician” (1961), which first appeared in 1930 as Meditación de la técnica.

Ortega y Gasset is probably the most important Spanish philosopher of the twentieth century. He was a public figure who engaged with the pressing question of how Spain should relate to the rest of Europe and to modernization. For a short time before World War II, he was also a parliamentarian. During the dictatorship of Franco, he worked as an exile in Argentina and returned to Madrid in 1948 to establish the Instituto de Humanidades, dedicated to the humanities and its societal relevance. He is now known as a “crisis” philosopher, critical about the reductionist and rationalist approaches that come with modernity and industrialization. A core idea of his philosophy is “vital reason,” defining humanity not just by reason but also by vitality. He described the human condition as marked by the urgent need to jump into life, with an overdose of energy and desire. He is best known for his work of cultural criticism entitled The Revolt of the Masses (1930), which points to the eroding forces of industrialization and the rise of a new citizen with no duties, only rights. The right to see things improve is among them: an entitlement to progress.

His Meditación de la técnica inspired me deeply because it criticized standard assumptions about technology and offered an alternative perspective on what it means to be human. The text begins with a critical reflection on what it is to “need” something, given that technology is usually seen as an answer to human necessities. So-called instrumentalist philosophy has further developed this view by claiming that technology should be understood as an extension of the human body. The idea is that, in contrast to animals, the human body is not sufficiently equipped to survive: humans lack fur, sharp nails, speed, and strength. Thus, technology comes to the rescue. Among the proponents of this view, the German philosopher Arnold Gehlen has characterized the human being as a Mängelwesen (deficient creature), who in contrast to animals needs technology to survive. Ortega finds these ideas too simplistic and investigates the condition of need. What does it mean that when you are cold, you need clothing and that when you are hungry, you need food? It means that you do not want to die. Without clothing and food you will die, so these things are necessary. Their necessity, Ortega argues, is thus conditional: The condition is the will to live. The necessity of needs, he concludes, is not the necessity of a stone falling downward. To live is the primary need; all other needs are secondary.

The second step in his investigation is a closer inspection of the need to live. What kind of need is it? He refers to anthropological studies showing that since the earliest traces of homo sapiens, both “useful” tools existed as well as “superfluous” ones, such as jewelry or musical instruments, and stimulants like khat and kola nuts. Likewise, there are many indications that fire was not just used for heat and food preparation but also for intoxication (to get drunk or high). Ortega concludes that the need to live cannot be distinguished from the need to have a good life—one with beauty, enchantment, and purpose. Here he clearly deviates from the well-known hierarchy of needs that Abraham Maslow proposed in the 1950s, in which “higher” needs like self-actualization are only addressed when “lower” needs like food and safety are met. Ortega argues that both high and low needs are necessary to live a good life and that technologies help achieve both. Technology should not be seen as a compensation for the deficient human body nor a strategy to cope with a hostile nature but as a means to have a good life. The “good life” is a primary invention from which all others follow and “technology is the production of the superfluous, today as in the Paleolithic age” (Ortega y Gasset 1930/1962, p. 18).

At this point in the text, Ortega points to a crucial difference between animals and humans. For animals, to live means to survive in nature; for humans, the pressure to survive has been minimized by technology. The time saved is filled with activities that are not dictated by biological needs but self-invented pursuits. For Ortega, being human, technology, and the good life are intimately related. Our task, he argues, is not to survive but to fulfill a program. In order to decide what to do, we cannot refer to natural laws or a fixed repertoire of activities, as animals do. Life is something we have to invent ourselves. Life starts with an invented life:

This invented life—invented as a novel or a play is invented—man calls “human life,” well-being … Have we heard right? Is human life in its most human dimension a work of fiction? Is man a sort of novelist of himself who conceives the fanciful figure of a personage with its unreal occupations and then, for the sake of converting it into reality, does all the things he does—and becomes an engineer? (Ortega y Gasset, 1930/1962, p. 108)

These and other quotes really moved me. The idea of “man a sort of novelist of himself” highlights the importance of drama, an imagined life, a narrative with protagonists, and a plot. This is the reality we live and must relate to: “Body and soul are things, but I am a drama, if anything, an unending struggle to be what I have to be” (p. 113); “To live … that is to find means and ways for realizing the program we are” (p. 116). And, given the urge to realize the program or drama, we must be persistent and inventive: “Man has to be an engineer, no matter whether he is gifted for it or not” (p. 136). So, while denying that technology is a rational answer to social needs—provided by engineers—Ortega concludes that we are all engineers nonetheless.

Reversing the Gaze on Expectations

Why was reading Ortega’s reflection on technology such a powerful experience? Two reasons stand out. First, his style is surprising and refreshing. The text lacks references, it does not introduce a proper problem definition, it does not detail and justify a method, and it contains sparse empirical data. The text simply departs from an idea—an observation, an intellectual puzzle—and then leads the reader through thoughts and suggestions, rejecting certain ideas while making bold claims along the way. While this style is not uncommon in philosophy, it differs markedly from the articles in Research Policy or in Social Studies of Science, the leading journals in my field of innovation and technology studies. The direct appeal to contemplate and the very urgency to think were refreshing; it contrasted with the formats in which I was trained to write. My encounter with this very different style encouraged me to be more daring in my own research and writing without abandoning the requirements of my research field. Ortega’s methodology inspired me to be faithful to my ideas in the very manner they came to me.

Secondly, reading this text was powerful because the ideas resonated with the twists and argumentation I had noted in my encounters with engineers and scientists. It helped me to make sense of and articulate them. For instance, I had become more and more skeptical of the prevailing idea that the work of engineers and researchers is characterized by identifying problems and, subsequently, solving them. It is a standard idea, also adhered to by engineers and researchers themselves, floating around as a truism in policies, newspapers, and teaching. It occurred to me, however, that engineers and researchers might not follow this logic. In many cases, the urgency to act and the directions of their efforts did not come from a persistent problem but were derived from ongoing competition. Engineers and researchers are remarkably keen to know what the latest trends are and what is happening in the rest of the field. In one of my case studies, I looked at the rise of membrane technology, dedicated to the sophisticated filtration of liquids and gases (Van Lente & Rip, 1998). Typical questions I encountered at conferences and in interviews included: What are Shell’s plans? What are Japan’s innovation programs? How far have the companies in California advanced? The urgency to engage with membrane technology is typically phrased as the fear of missing boats or trains that cannot be stopped. Evidently, firms, researchers, and even governmental actors cannot afford to lag behind in innovation races. Moreover, such competition is typically framed in terms of promises and expectations: What is the promising direction to engage with; where will the competition be in the next few years? When a direction in membrane technology is seen as promising—and the moves of competitors indicate this—there is pressure to respond and act accordingly. New technologies, I concluded, do not derive from a problem; rather, they begin with a promise.

In principle, my findings aligned with the starting points of evolutionary economics and could be phrased in those terms. Indeed, researchers and firms must operate under conditions of uncertainty and—yes—heuristics guide them in their searches. The basic argumentation is that when the information to decide is incomplete, one cannot optimize the decision but must come to a satisfying solution instead, as Herbert Simon (1957) has argued. Also, in my research on expectations, I found that the information of engineers and firms was incomplete (for all kinds of obvious reasons) and that, in their decision-making, expectations helped to fill these gaps. My reading of Ortega y Gasset, however, reversed that perspective. Now, I was able to formulate that firms and engineers do not start with gaps in information to be filled with expectations. Instead, they begin with an imaginary future world in which, say, membrane technology exists, which is taken seriously by firms and countries worldwide—and from this, they decide how this should influence their actions. The rhetorical entity of a promising new field of membrane technology is then filled in with actual work (Van Lente & Rip, 1998). Through the promise, funding becomes available, colleagues become interested, and competitors feel the pressure to take it seriously. Increasingly, membrane technology becomes more real, exerting more pressure on engineers, firms, or governments (Van Lente, 2000). Efforts by others are then considered proof that membrane technology really exists and demands more attention and greater efforts. Even my own research into the rhetoric of this emerging world of membrane research was seen as another form of proof. As one interviewee said to me, “Given that someone from the university is now describing its history, membrane technology must be something to take into account” (Van Lente & Rip, 1998).

Ultimately, I could articulate that technology does not start with a problem but rather a promise. In contrast to the standard notion of engineers identifying problems to be solved, I now saw engineers inventing an imaginary world. And they do what they do in order to realize this imaginary world. The reader may ask: “Have I heard right? Is human life in its most human dimension a work of fiction”? Yes, now I was able to phrase how the work of engineers begins with fiction—how it is embedded in fiction, assessed by fiction, and propelled by fiction.

The Past of Futures

Ortega’s Meditación de la Técnica does even more. After investigating life as drama, as necessity conditioning all other needs, Ortega dwells on the rise of technology in modern societies. Here, he roughly distinguishes between three modes or phases in which technology appeared in the history of Western societies. The chronology Ortega suggests is not original and too cursory for historical purposes, but he introduces a conceptual twist that, again, helped me in my thinking about how expectations are part of technological change. In the first phase Ortega identifies, technology is fully situated in everyday life: Homo sapiens use tools, and the skills for doing so are by now common practice. When humans began to urbanize, special skills were needed and technologies became part of craftsmanship. Some specialized as blacksmiths, others as carpenters or architects. The appearance of modern technology in the third phase was marked by the founding of engineering schools in the late eighteenth century. Here, Ortega argues, the continuous improvement of technology was postulated as a possibility. Of course, the idea of technological progress was not entirely new, but it had been seen as a token of good craftsmanship. When craftspeople successfully used and improved the technology of their trade, it indicated the high quality of their work, establishing their reputation as blacksmiths, carpenters, or architects. Technology was hidden behind the person, as Ortega phrases it. In the third phase, however, technology itself appeared: The notion of “technological progress” became visible and it was the task of engineers to take care of it.

What I find appealing in this reflection is the idea of guaranteed progress: the notion that technological improvement can rightfully be expected to occur. The engineer is certain to find a novel solution, Ortega notes, but how can that be? What strikes me about this exercise is Ortega’s intellectual audacity: Instead of presenting a historical reconstruction, he highlights an idea, a principle. The reduction of the history of technology to three phases may be too facile, but it helps to articulate the character of modern technology. It is no longer hidden behind craftsmanship—instead, technology refers to human beings’ confident assumption that technical solutions will be found—continuously, now, and in the future.

Ortega’s idea of modern technology as the certainty that improvements will occur, points to an overarching generic promise. In my fieldwork, I encountered such generic promises when spokespersons of a particular technology—say membrane technology—embedded their claims in the idea of technological progress as such. Their reasoning, then, was that when it is certain that technological progress will occur, this particular technology is a likely candidate to facilitate it. Their claims found fertile soil since decision makers in firms and policy circles also departed from the conviction that some technology must be promising. Their sole task was to decide which one it was. The importance of the generic promise inspired me to elaborate on how technological promises are nested: Smaller promises (of, say, a new material) refer to more encompassing promises of a particular technology, which, in turn, are eventually supported by the generic promise—that is, the culturally embedded conviction that there will be technological progress.

The modern certainty that there will be progress is not just a matter of ideology; it is paralleled by a societal task division. I coined this as the mandate for engineers: When society in general adopts the idea that technology brings progress, engineers are “mandated” to decide which directions and options are promising. That is, engineers are appointed as the rulers of technological promise, and this comes with both privileges and obligations. On the one hand, this mandate implies a freedom to decide on behalf of others what the next technological promise will be and what is worthwhile to pursue. Is biotechnology the next big thing or is it artificial intelligence? Engineers and technological prophets will inform us. On the other hand, it also brings accountability: Engineers are expected to take good care of technological promise—again, on behalf of others. And when promises appear to fail or when other concerns about technology emerge, the efforts of engineers will be judged. When, for instance, a country is not as rapid as other countries in pursuing a promising technology, the question will be: Who is to blame? Were the engineers sufficiently motivated to keep up with progress? Have they neglected the promise? What interested me was not the particular outcome of the blame question but the very idea of blaming itself. It refers to a moral shortcoming and to a frustrated, unfulfilled expectation that progress should be inevitable.

Conclusion: The Merits of a Detour

My research on the role of expectations in the development of technology developed into a so-called sociology of expectations, which describes what it means that engineers do not begin with problems to be solved but promises to be fulfilled. The basic tenets are that innovations take place in a “sea of expectations” (Van Lente, 2012). Firms and engineers position themselves in an imaginary future world and act accordingly. They try to decide what the promising routes are and use the actions of their competitors as indications. Is membrane technology the future? If so, we cannot wait, and we should join the bandwagon. Others, in turn, seen their actions as proof that this is indeed the way to go—clearly, this is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

A sociology of expectations provides a novel approach to the question of direction in the study of innovation (Konrad et al., 2017). In this chapter, I reconstructed how this novel approach has benefited from an unexpected approach. I showed how a decisive turn in my research did not come from the usual suspects in my field but from an early twentieth-century philosopher who based his thinking on the vitality of the human spirit (Dust, 1991). Yet his emphasis on the constitutive role of the “good life”—the invented life that fuels human actions—provided the research on expectations with a novel twist. It reversed the gaze on expectations.

My account also testifies to the merit of intellectual excursions in general. The unfamiliar phrasing, the unexpected queries, and a surprising style of reasoning can offer a novel approach to research puzzles. In my case, it brought some new insights, a unique perspective, and a bold way of reasoning. Interdisciplinary excursions may shift the angle, provide a new vocabulary, and, in this way, sharpen concepts. My account also shows that such gains cannot be planned. While not all excursions may be useful, it certainly pays off to step outside of one’s research plan every now and then and enjoy the detour.