Keywords

Current society is an innovation society and an entrepreneurship society, but only in a rather superficial sense. In the name of progress, mostly understood as economic growth but also sustainable development, innovation and entrepreneurship are viewed as the solutions to all of society’s problems and challenges. Meanwhile, signs abound that real innovation and real entrepreneurial efforts are less valued in society and the economy, that the real or deeper contributions of innovation to our societies are seen as less important than the appearance of innovation, and that both innovation and entrepreneurship are treated as ends in themselves, or only means to achieve economic growth.

Innovation—real innovation—has shaped the world as we know it, and created the unprecedented wealth and wellbeing of current society. There are many horrors in this world that can be blamed on exploitation of people and natural resources in the pursuit of technological and social innovation for the benefit of the few. There are, likewise, grave economic injustices that are hard to separate from the largely innovation-based economic development of the Global North, and several examples of innovation being used by dictators and oppressors against the security, dignity and privacy of people. But overall, there can be no doubt that innovation—the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance” (Ridley 2020: 2)—has turned the world into an enormously safer, freer, richer, and more enjoyable place now than 50, 100, or 200 years ago. Imagine what innovation can do if it is allowed to continue to be this source of astonishing improvement. And imagine the losses we will suffer if we leave it stuck in emptiness.

This book argues that there are imminent risks of the latter. Due to society’s obsession with innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth, too much energy and resources are currently spent on appearing to be innovative and entrepreneurial. The result is emptiness. The book outlines a number of possible causes and likely consequences of this simultaneously tragic and laughable predicament, and some alternatives in the shape of a deeper and more reliable understanding of what innovation is and how it can contribute to society.

The Problem

In recent years, several stories of fake and meaningless innovation projects have reached the news, with venture capitalists spending hundreds of millions of dollars and entrepreneurs propelled into stardom, but with little or no value created. The fraudulent medical technology company Theranos, founded in 2003 by Stanford University alumnus (and Steve Jobs admirer) Elizabeth Holmes, managed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital for its proposed automated and rapid blood testing technology, before it was exposed as a sham by investigative journalists in 2015–16. The company was subsequently dissolved, and several criminal charges were pressed against Holmes and other company executives (Carreyrou 2018; Jeske 2020). In 2016, the laughably over-engineered Juicero juice press was introduced on the market, initially sold at a price of $699 (later lowered to €399, in response to slow sales), and with subscription plans for small bags of fruits and vegetables, whose origin and storage life could be tracked online. The Juicero was said to exert four tons of pressure, enough to lift two Tesla cars, but was exposed in a viral news story in 2017 as over-engineered, over-priced, and arguably even useless—the machine produced juice with a quality allegedly indistinguishable from hand pressed juice. The Juicero project had similarly managed to raise over a hundred million dollars in venture capital from, among others, Google Ventures (Schaefer and Hallonsten 2023). The Swedish spaceship-like Uniti car, the brainchild of Lund University student Lewis Horne who formed his startup in 2016, initially used crowdfunding to secure cash flow, but eventually also attracted venture capital. The company produced a series of prototypes, promising that it would design, manufacture, and sell an electric car with a revolutionary design, built with 100% renewable materials and featuring an advanced human-machine interaction system and autonomous driving functions. Uniti, however, repeatedly postponed delivery of its first car and switched designs and locations for production several times. In early 2022, it was exposed as a fraud in an investigative journalist coverage and it went bankrupt (Atefie 2022).

These are but three examples of shiny and dazzling seem-to-be innovations of a type that current society tends to celebrate, and that venture capitalists are prepared to invest a lot of money and expectations in, which turn out to be empty or useless. Judging from extant literature, the examples are perhaps extreme, but not unique: There is a lot of evidence of innovation gone astray, with enormous amounts of money and prestige invested by both private and public actors in projects and ventures with little or no provable usefulness, and sometimes complete emptiness—an alluring surface, but no substance (e.g. Jones and Spicer 2009; Harford 2011; Hasu et al. 2012; Erixon and Weigel 2016; Gaglio 2017; Greenspan and Wooldridge 2018; Douthat 2020; Wennberg and Sandström 2022).

But it takes two to tango. The misguided entrepreneurs of Theranos, Juicero, Uniti, and all other similar companies, are not in this pursuit on their own. Governments and organizations spend vast amounts of money and effort on boosting innovation in all kinds of shades and flavors, from the European Commission’s billion-Euro “flagship programs”, via national and regional subsidiaries to specific scientific and technological areas, to training programs and venture capital for individual entrepreneurs, in the hope (or belief) that this will be of benefit to the economy.

There seems to be no limit to what policymakers and pundits expect that innovation can achieve. Above and beyond renewal and economic development on long term, innovation is today a “panacea” (Godin 2012: 37; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017: 784), generally viewed as an “institutional and individual road to salvation” (Brattström and Wennberg 2022), and the “ultimate solution to present welfare related problems in the West” (Gripenberg et al. 2012: 1). Innovation has therefore become “a policy obsession” (Pfotenhauer 2019: 191), and its alleged importance is treated as an axiom for policymaking (Sveiby et al. 2012b: 250). In many of the resulting policies and investments, innovation has ceased to be something real, that contributes to society and the economy by making substantial improvements to life in various respects, and has instead become the theme of a new “worldview or belief system” shared by policymakers, bureaucrats, communication officers, consultants, and even academics. The result is the spread of “innovationism”, an “invisible and naturalized” ideology, and an “accepted, self-evident, future-oriented-and collective-way of imagining a better future” (Valaskivì 2012: 150). Similarly, entrepreneurship has “become a mantra that has worked, paradoxically, by repetition”, with the same platitudes repeated by business gurus and “echoed by politicians seeking economic cures” (Jones and Spicer 2009: 2).

The result is, sadly, an abundance of misplaced initiatives and empty talk. For example, the European Union’s 2000 Lisbon strategy stated that the EU was to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010 (European Union 2000). Commentators have noted that the strategy was built on unrealistic promises and a deficient understanding of how regions and nations develop, and that its layout was aimed at meeting specific targets defined in a number of shallow indicators, rather than working purposefully to achieve real change and progress (Tausch 2010; James 2012). This notwithstanding, the EU has moved on from the Lisbon Strategy to even more ambitious programs, like Europe 2020, which appears as something of an invasive innovation policy framework program that takes over the agenda and subsumes other (important) policy areas like research policy, education policy, environmental policy, and industrial policy under its aims (Nauwelaers and Wintjes 2008: 286; Flanagan et al. 2011: 703; Lagendijk and Varró 2013: 115). National equivalents are just as grandiose, and just as superficial. In 2012, for example, the Swedish government launched its “innovation strategy” with the purpose to “contribute to a climate with the best possible conditions for innovation in Sweden with year 2020 in sight” (Swedish Government 2012). But although thousands of representatives from academia, industry, and government reportedly were invited to chip in, the strategy itself is “pretty thin and diluted” (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 311). Similar “innovation strategies”, containing mostly empty phrases with little or no connection to any real innovative capacity or effort, exist in many countries and on several levels of government (Pfotenhauer et al. 2019: 895; Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff 2017: 784). In order to back up these strategies with practical and concrete action, in most countries, specifically designated and considerably sizable innovation agencies have been set up with the mission of distributing public funding for innovation and keeping track of innovation policy and execution, which usually means producing reports, brochures and marketing slogans.

But the governmental obsession with innovation and pursuit of unrealistic expectations and promises of sustainable economic growth is not restricted to hot air and glossy brochures. The cross-disciplinary field of innovation studies, usually lacking a critical perspective and sometimes very difficult to distinguish from governmental or corporate branding efforts, has boomed and now has a home in academic research units in most universities. In the borderland between academia, business consultancy, and public administration reside a seemingly self-sustaining class of “innovation experts”, occupied with formulating, executing, and evaluating innovation policies and innovation-promoting initiatives with doubtful real significance for the economy or broader society, but nonetheless funded with millions of Euros and dollars every year (Wisnioski 2019). Their activities extend to various innovation events, where innovation experts hold workshops and mingle with entrepreneurs, academics, elected officials, and public servants under visionary slogans and imaginative rhetoric, as well as massive wasteful spending on whatever new technology or imaginative future model for the sustainable organizing of local and global society. The purpose of “innovation events” where “canonized preachers profess their faith” (Valaskivì 2012: 150) is quite clearly not to innovate—the absence of any hands-on activities at such gatherings is conspicuous—but to provide opportunities for “a form of collective endorsement of belief” in innovation (Andersson Cederholm and Hall 2020: 1416). Such events form a key ingredient in the maintenance of a collective identity among the many consultants, academics, politicians, bureaucrats, and corporate actors that make up the innovation elites who live off the promise that the innovation obsession entails, that these elites actually can contribute to economic development (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 314).

It doesn’t stop there. The innovation elites also make concrete efforts toward such assumed contributions, pouring hundreds of millions of Euros into gargantuan programs to stimulate R&D and industrial development both in very practical and hands-on areas like hydrogen fuel cells and efficient batteries, and concerning more visionary and vaguely defined things like the “circular economy” and the “energy transition” (Amenta and Stagnaro 2022: 247), aiming to turn costs into investments and achieve growth, innovation, job creation as part of the task to save the planet. Similarly, an “entrepreneurship industry” has been built up, consisting of a heterogeneous set of actors and organizations that produce and market “goods and services explicitly intended for opportunity discovery and development by current and prospective entrepreneurs” (Hunt and Kiefer 2017: 231). Entrepreneurship education programs are commonplace at universities and colleges today, embedded in a variety of institutional arrangements that are said to stimulate innovation and make entrepreneurs out of both students and teachers. Governments and their agencies award massive amounts of money in prices and grants to prospective entrepreneurs and innovations. Inside companies, corporate venturing activities such as innovation labs, incubators, venture capital, and innovation outposts are mobilized to make the organizations more innovative. While estimated to have a volume of tens of billions annually just in the United States, the “entrepreneurship industry” is not conducive of entrepreneurial success and innovation: It has been shown that consumption of the products and services of the entrepreneurship industry lowers both entrepreneurial performance and chances for businesses to survive in the long run (Hunt and Kiefer 2017). The result is therefore more of an “untrepreneurial economy”, meaning an economy “in which extensive efforts and resources are invested in entrepreneurial activities that appear to be innovative and economically valuable, but lack the substance to contribute meaningfully to economic growth” (Hartmann et al. 2020: 881).

Emptiness is not only deceitful, but also wasteful.

Conceptual Starting Points

Disconnects between what people say and do, and gaps between the public image conveyed by organizations and what happens inside them, are well-known in organization studies (e.g. Alvesson 2013/2022; Spicer 2018; Hallonsten 2022b). In fact, it has been shown that many organizations, who continuously have to handle goal conflicts, ambiguity, and conflicting demands of different stakeholders, routinely make different appearances in different contexts—saying one thing, deciding another, and doing a third—and thus engage in “organized hypocrisy” (Brunsson 1989/2002). This shall be understood descriptively and analytically, rather than pejoratively, and as an often times necessary strategic tool for organizations to cope with incompatible demands.

But the pejorative ring to the word “hypocrisy” should also prompt us to stop and reflect. In public organizations, that live off taxpayers’ money, organized hypocrisy is probably as unethical as the wording suggests. Private firms, whose success and failure are natural features of well-functioning markets and who usually live off the talent, hard labor, and financial investments of private citizens, should perhaps be spared from similar critique—after all, their wasteful spending on empty innovation occurs only at their own loss, at least in monetary terms. But let’s not forget the displacement effects. What real or substantial innovation do these companies fail to achieve when doing empty innovation? Also, much of the innovation complex of governments, agencies, consultants and researchers is about putting taxpayers’ money to work in the knowledge-based economy, meaning, really, that also private companies that do empty innovation live off substantial governmental subsidies.

In this book, a starting point and conceptual viewpoint is the empirically identified discrepancy between empty innovation and real innovation, which we interpret theoretically with the help of the concept of “organized hypocrisy” and several similar conceptualizations from the broad field of management and organization studies. Among these can be mentioned Abrahamson’s (1991) path-breaking study of managerial fads and fashions, Alvesson’s (2013/2022) treatise on grandiosity, pseudo-events, and window-dressing in organizations, Spicer’s (2018) analysis of “business bullshit”, and a recent conceptualization of parts of contemporary organizational life as “pseudo reality” (Hallonsten 2022b). These studies are all indebted to the very popular neo-institutional organization theory, which builds on a fundamental understanding of organizations as torn between the rationality myths projected at them by their various stakeholders and broader society, and their real inner workings which are usually complex, chaotic, and irrational. The decoupling of these two worlds, and the tendency of organizations in the same field to grow increasingly similar (isomorphic) in terms of the rationality myths they adhere to and display their adherence to, are fundamental for the social legitimacy of organizations in current society, which in turn is one of their most valued assets (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983).

From an organizational point of view, therefore, a “yawning abyss” between the surface—the “grandiose but largely empty talk and action of managers, administrators, communication officers, and similar”—and the substance—the “reality of organizational work processes as experienced by the professionals who make up the ‘operating core’ of organizations” (Hallonsten 2022b: 1) might be convenient and suitable, although it comes with certain risks. For organizations, and for the individuals who populate them, this yawning abyss might create negative spirals. Acts of window-dressing, to make organizations more “innovative”, occur increasingly out of touch with the actual operations of organizations. People involved in these actual operations—as employees, clients, customers, or other stakeholders—are rather quick to realize this, which expectably leads them to revert to cynicism (Gabriel 2008). But, most importantly: From society’s point of view, the question must be asked differently, and attention paid to the activities and processes that organizations are involved in. How severe is the risk that the resources and energy put into building and polishing a shiny surface have been taken away from core activities upon which society arguably depends?

This is an academic study, and the primary audience is therefore an academic community. This is not seldom discussed in regretful terms: Academic work, and especially social science, is recurrently accused of producing mostly trivial results or even nonsense (Tourish 2019: 133ff), meaningless claims intended only for consumption by “sub-sub-specialisms” or “microtribes with highly parochial interests and concerns” and thus failing to “address the burning issues of our times” (Alvesson et al. 2017: 5–7). In the context of this book and its subject matter, such accusations should be taken seriously: We academics are certainly not innocent to the policy obsession with innovation, or to the growing entrepreneurship industry. Both entrepreneurship and innovation have in very broad and general terms been treated as self-evidently positive, and described as straightforwardly simple processes, in an abundance of academic studies (Jones and Spicer 2009: 113; Sveiby et al. 2012a). But it can be even worse still: Though we know little for certain about the real reasons—inability (incompetence), perverted incentives, or other forms of external pressure—it seems academic work on innovation, entrepreneurship, grand challenges, sustainable development, and so on, is indeed infested by superficial repetition of grandiose policy language—easy to digest, but without much depth or meaning. It has been claimed that as much as half of all peer reviewed articles published within the field of “sustainability and transitions” should be characterized as “scholarly bullshit”, in other words “so pointless and unnecessary that even the scholar producing it cannot justify its existence” (Kirchherr 2023: 2). Such “scholarly bullshit” can of course seem rather harmless, but at the very least, it risks elevating topics and entire fields of study into a prominence they do not deserve. This, in turn, can lead policymakers and bureaucrats to believe in “research findings” that are neither relevant nor correct. Whether or not this is a real problem should of course be the subject of careful empirical studies. But there are real and imminent risks that findings that emerge from scholarly work is too hastily accepted or established by decision makers as scientific proof or even “truth” (Hallonsten 2022a: 287; Pacchioni 2018: 82; Roberts and Shambrook 2012: 34). This book was peer reviewed at an early stage of its completion, and while that procedure certainly should be considered some certification of the merit of its contents and claims, it should not fool readers to blindly believe every syllable. Everyone’s own judgment of the validity of the arguments is ultimately what matters most, in order to give the book and its message credibility.

Academics take part in fueling society’s obsession with innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth also by maintaining unnaturally close connections with the policymakers and bureaucrats of the innovation theater, and the actors and institutions of the entrepreneurship industry. Put differently, there is way too much scholarly research going on in the business schools, faculties of social sciences, and cross-disciplinary “centers for innovation studies” and the like, characterized not only by a deafening “pro-innovation bias” (e.g. Abrahamson 1991; Sveiby et al. 2012a; Fougère and Harding, 2012; Godin and Vinck 2017; Segercrantz et al. 2017) but also by something that can be called policy positivism. This is analogous with “legal positivism” which is a jurisprudence doctrine that asserts that whatever the current law says is right and righteous, without any other ethical or practical considerations made (Hart 1961/2012). Policy positivism thus means that researchers, consciously or subconsciously, uncritically embrace any current political, bureaucratic, or managerial message, and uncritically study projects and ventures launched by governments and their agencies, or by the higher managerial strata of corporations. In practice, in innovation studies, this means that when governments (or the European Commission) launch new major funding program to support academic “excellence centers” or “innovation hubs” or “triple helix partnerships”, innovation scholars put out a flood of publications in international journals that document and analyze these programs and the “centers”, “hubs”, and “partnerships” they support, with little or no critical assessment of the suitability, meaning, or adequacy of the programs and their structures. The tendency is not new, and has been observed in other fields and in academia generally (Fay 1975: 27; Ball 1995: 259). Innovation scholars seem to constantly fail to take into account the vast knowledge about policymaking failure available in political science and economics (Kärnä et al. 2022). It is almost as if they view themselves as champions of (current) innovation policymaking, rather than the critical analysts they arguably should be.

The explanation for policy positivism is, of course, simple and straightforward: Innovation scholars are, just like most or all academic researchers, dependent on the whims of their funders. You do not readily bite the hand that feeds you, especially not if you lack tenure and live your professional life one temporary employment contract at a time. In Sweden, the national agency for “innovation systems”, created on the basis of an ideologized view of what innovation is and how it can and should be promoted (Eklund 2007), has funded virtually all existing research environments dedicated to the study of innovation for at least 15 years (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 311). But also, those of us who work elsewhere, and who enjoy the security and institutionalized academic freedom of permanent employment, recurrently need access to empirical material which is available only at the generosity and good will of organizations that have some kind of stake in what we study. The absence of first-hand empirical accounts in this book is only partly due to this predicament. The ambition to keep a healthy distance to the topic, in order to maintain the necessary critical perspective, is just as relevant.

But more important is the following disclaimer: The work behind this book has not received any third-party funding, and is therefore in this sense not indebted to anyone (but, by extension, the Swedish taxpayers). Whether or not this makes the analysis more critical or honest in any deep sense is for the reader to judge, but the intentions in this regard are clear: Social science is supposed to critically scrutinize existing structures, norms and patterns in the social world in order to redeem humans from false consciousness and oppressive models of thought (Habermas 1971: 67ff, 301ff; cf. Giddens 1996: 65), adopt a qualitative approach in the sense of interpreting and seeking to obtaining a deep and complex understanding of a phenomenon at hand (Mills 1959/2000: 51ff), and not shy away from controversial and challenging topics but instead show that things are indeed more complicated than the politician, bureaucrat, or business leader claim that they are (Berger 1963: 29–34).

Aims and Purpose

Armed with the honest determination of adopting—or, really, maintaining—a critical view and examine current society’s obsession with innovation with a challenging and consequence-neutral mindset, it is high time to pin down the intended contribution of this book, and explicate some more of the theoretical perspectives that are used in the study.

As already suggested, there is, unfortunately, much to suggest that the misguided obsession with innovation has the effect that real or profound innovation is much slower and less frequent now than, say, fifty or seventy years ago (see e.g. Erixon and Weigel 2016; Gordon 2016: 566ff; Heyman et al. 2019; Douthat 2020). Quite a number of studies claim, on basis of a variety of data and analytical approaches, that “ideas may be getting harder to find”, that is, more money is being spent today for the same, or indeed less, output in terms of technological breakthroughs and marketable products and services (Bloom et al. 2020; Griliches 1994; Kortum 1993; Jones 2009, 2010; Kogan et al. 2017). Similar studies of the outcomes of entrepreneurship—usually defined as the rate of business startups and their subsequent survival—point at an overall productivity and efficiency decline in the United States as well as Western and Central Europe (Decker et al. 2014, 2016a, 2016b; Brattström 2022). One must be very cautious toward all kinds of quantifications of research and innovation output, and therefore we may not in this book draw any definitive conclusions on this point, but settle with establishing that these studies are fairly unanimous in a claim that is hard to completely discard.

It is fundamental to the analysis and critical ambition of this book to reject any attempts—scholarly, consultant, or political—to reliably measure innovation with any sufficiently robust and simple indicators to enable stringent comparison over time. This is quite simply not possible, due to the systemic, cumulative, social, inert, and complex nature of innovation (which we will return to in the book’s final chapter). Most of all, one should be very careful to evaluate the outcomes of innovation with too short time horizons. First of all, Amara’s Law, which states that the impact of new technology is usually overestimated in the short run but underestimated in the long run (Searls 2012: 7), creates an unfortunate and unshakeable bias in such evaluation. But it is also the case that most really transformative innovations are accomplished in very long chains of events and through multiple intertwined processes. As a very telling example shows, most of the technologies that make up the crucial parts of one of the most transformative innovations of the past century, the smartphone, were developed at a time and in a context far distant from the ingenious and resourceful work of assembling them into a consumer product (Mazzucato 2013: 93–119). A simple thought experiment, based on this example, suffices to show how misguided any attempts are to evaluate the outcomes of innovation too quickly or with too simple metrics: Who, counting citations or patents or startups, would be able to capture the full range of impact that the transistor (invented at Bell Labs in the late 1940s), the solid state storage technology (invented at Toshiba and SanDisk in the 1980s), or the lithium-ion battery (invented by researchers at Oxford University, the Asahi Kasei Corporation, and Exxon Research & Engineering Company in the 1970s)? Nobody. Their true impact has not been revealed until very recently (and it is probable that we still don’t know its full extension), when they were put together (with several other technologies) in a consumer electronics device that to date has sold billions of units worldwide and changed not only the telecommunications industry but, arguably, also contributed to revolutionizing changes to the music and movie industries, mass media, several other consumer markets, urban transport, and even geopolitics, and in turn spurred the creation of several other multi-billion-dollar companies. In light of this impact, both incredibly deep and unfathomably broad, the type of “impact” that current shallow and simplified evaluation practices can manage to capture, pales.

But also if innovation is hard to trace, and even harder (not to say impossible) to evaluate the impact of, there is much to suggest that it has very little, if anything, to do with “innovationism” and all the other expressions of society’s obsession with innovation and entrepreneurship. Simply put, there is “no evidence that actual innovation or technological change has increased during the period when everyone started talking about innovation” (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 13). It is a dire predicament of our current society that real innovation is in seeming decline while innovation policy, innovation fuzz, and centrally planned efforts to create innovation are intensifying. Empty innovation, the title of this book, therefore means something deep, both cultural and social, and with a history of its own. Why is current society obsessed with innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth, and why is it also seemingly incapable of achieving real innovation to any degree remotely close to this obsession, as expressed in policymaking, advertisements, and broader discourse?

The book sets out to answer these questions with the help of a sociological and historical analysis, based on years of research experience in the contemporary history of science and innovation, the sociology of science, and the science-society interface. In the book, several historical trends in politics, economy, and broader society are discussed—economization, bureaucratization, shortsightedness and impatience, unrealistic promises and expectations, an unnatural status assigned to entrepreneurship, a paradoxical simultaneous regionalism and globalism among politicians, and many others. In the next chapter, the origins and development of innovation as a concept and as a policy area are briefly chronicled, with specific attention to the rise of what Valaskivì 2012 calls “innovationism” and Vinsel and Russell (2020) call “innovation speak”, and the transition of innovation into a key position in policy- and decision-making in the past half a century. Thereafter, in three broad thematic chapters, several historical and social trends are discussed that may, in different ways, have contributed to the development that took innovation from something ubiquitous but comparably unnoticed in our societies, to abundantly lauded and promoted but essentially empty. In the final chapter, the potential harmful consequences of the developments are discussed and summarized, together with an outline of how the arguably devastating current situation can be changed to the better, based on a more accurate and honest understanding and appreciation of what innovation is, how it works, and how it can be promoted.