Keywords

Influential sociological works have conceptualized modernity as a state of social acceleration, which means that current late modernity is characterized by speed and change at extreme levels (Bauman 2000; Giddens 2002; Rosa 2013). Everything is expected to happen instantly, and swift progress is seen as imperative and something current societies and their inhabitants, are entitled to.

In the economy, critics have argued, this acceleration has created a shortsightedness and an almost complete focus on “getting the biggest returns in the shortest time possible” (Roberts 2015: 4). On consumer markets, social acceleration has created a situation where immediate gratification is treated “as if it were life’s primary goal, to be pursued as efficiently and unapologetically as possible” (Roberts 2015: 9). Management scholars have likened the culture and ethics of speed with the fast-food industry (Ritzer 1993), and identified “fast management” as a widespread problem. Organizations are today “change-obsessed, attention-starved and over-hyped”; their managers use and reproduce “mass-produced ideas and lacks substance”; with the result that their members “suffer harmful effects similar to those of habitual (‘supersized’) fast food consumers” (Kärreman et al. 2021: 1).

It is in one sense reasonable to wish for acceleration in innovation. Because it is the source of wealth and well-being, and the likely solution to many (if not most) social and environmental challenges, people put great faith in innovation. It is therefore only expectable and understandable if society would want to see its processes accelerated in order to bring more improvements to more people, faster. Meanwhile, the speed imperative also risks breeding unsustainable practices, shortsightedness, and greed. Chasing higher speeds and swifter returns runs counter to careful improvement of ideas and inventions in a way that creates durable and sustainable benefits for the many. There is a major risk that the speed imperative makes innovators, producers and marketers favor the easily sellable and the easily disposable—more products sold, more revenue, resulting also in more waste and less satisfied consumers, in the long run and broader perspective. Speed also causes problems such as stress and mental health issues, and waste of natural and human resources (Hasu et al. 2012: 89).

Meanwhile, of course, progress is good and promises of progress are therefore appealing. Progress also has the rare quality of signaling inevitability in a very long historical perspective: Past achievements, current efforts, and future prospects are woven together in a sequence that becomes an unmistakable part of society’s understanding of its capability to produce wealth, fight disease, and make cultural advances (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983). Innovation embodies this idea of progress, and becomes very hard to be against, precisely since it is such a flexible term, and a concept “wrapped (…) in promises about its future impact” (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 11). This enables a near complete neglect of the question of whether something introduced as new really brings any real improvement, because it is not assessed on basis of any such improvement, but simply on basis of its novelty.

As reflected by the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences and the humanities, current society is characterized by “the realization that our language does not merely mirror the world but is instead partially constitutive of it” (Ball 1985: 740; cf. Rorty 1967). This means that the analysis of politics must entail efforts to understand its imagery and rhetoric, also (or especially) when seemingly aloof from anything real (Norval 2000: 316). On the highest level of abstraction, a joint understanding about the most favorable course of action becomes an ideograph, a “high order abstraction, representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal”, often a word or expression with general meaning that is politicized by being laden with meaning that goes way beyond plain semantics. It can be used as a political asset in the promotion of a specific cause, because it “warrants the use of power” and “guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable” (McGee 1980: 15). Put differently, a “myth” is institutionalized as “objectively given” and becomes hegemonic; “transformed into an imaginary” or “a horizon on which a multiplicity of demands may be inscribed” (Norval 2000: 329). Innovation is today a myth as much as it is real.

Selling Promises

The doctrinal shift in science and innovation policy in the West in the 1970s, which led to the second generation of innovation policy (Chap. 2), introduced “strategic” policies and programs oriented to “picking the winners” in science by prioritizing between investments and funding opportunities (Irvine and Martin 1984). This type of competitive prioritization creates a situation of competition between projects and investments, both aligning research funding systems with an enterprise culture (Chap. 3) and a general tendency of “projectification” seen in the organizing of public services and the economy, in the same era (Hodgson et al. 2019). Prompting champions of specific projects to promotion and marketing efforts, it leads to a strange quasi-market where investments are pitted against each other and made to compete for the attention of decision-makers and, by extension, media space, and public notice.

The expectation that only (or mostly) those innovation projects and investments that are considered strategic should be funded (Irvine and Martin 1984: 3–5; Stokes 1997), also introduced to project promotion campaigns the key feature of mobilizing expectations of future benefit or utility. Without this marketing component, projects will risk falling short in the continuously harshening prioritizing game (van Lente 1993: 10–11). Promises and expectations of scientific and technological breakthroughs therefore need to be made real and very tangible, also if they are uncertain (Hallonsten 2020: 248ff). By this logic innovation, which is inherently unpredictable, must be made into something very real in terms of what it will deliver to society (Valaskivì 2012: 149).

This is only paradoxical on the surface. In fact, in political campaigning, uncertainties are regularly turned into direct advantages. This is because all expectations entail a belief in a promise of some kind, and therefore expectations have an imperative built-in, that can give just the right momentum for a political campaign, if carefully but cunningly put to use. A purposeful political exploitation of a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1948), this use of the power of expectations follows a simple logic: Once a promise is presented and expectations of its fulfillment are spread, the politically responsible course of action is to act to (try to) fulfill the promises and (try to) meet the expectations (van Lente 2000). Politicians can go on suggesting new policies crafted to attain the promise for a long time, and though they always run the risk of being accused of exploiting the same promise over and over again, the promise itself is usually more powerful as a motivation for action. Thus could, for example, Richard Nixon successfully run for U.S. president twice (1968 and 1972) with the promise of ending the war in Vietnam (Scanlon 2009), and Donald Trump could almost succeed to win a second term as U.S. President in 2020, with the same promise he had made four years earlier, to “make America great again” (Dost et al. 2021).

The social theory foundation for this is ancient but powerful. The inherent uncertainty of expectations means that those who hold them do not know for certain that they will be fulfilled, but need to place trust in them. Trust, in turn, is not built on that which is justifiable by observation or reason: Whereas trust in the certain collapses at the first disappointment, trust in the uncertain is continuously reinforced by the threats of the alternative to the expected or hoped-for. In the view of the public, therefore, uncertainty necessitates (political) action to fulfill the expectation, and expectations become stronger political assets the more grandiose they are (Luhmann 1979: 79). Thereby, promises and expectations are transformed from prospects to be fulfilled (or not fulfilled), and into assets in the mobilization of action and support. When they are adopted by the public or by a significantly influential interest group, promises and expectations swiftly lead to demands of action to reduce the uncertainty they carry, by their fulfillment (van Lente 1993, 2000; Brown and Michael 2003; Borup et al. 2006).

This way, colossal investment packages in fuzzy but strategic efforts to accomplish a “circular economy” or “energy transition” or similar can be rather conveniently marketed and promoted with the help of promises and expectations. The enormous costs of saving the planet from climate change by leaving the fossil-fuel-based economy and society behind, are turned into investments that will achieve growth, innovation, job creation—and, for that matter, technical solutions and futuristic gadgets (like self-driving cars and ultra-low energy buildings) to cater to the vanity of the urban middle-class. Specific expectations are invoked for specific projects and programs—investments in hydrogen fuel cells and efficient batteries are promoted with reference to futuristic autonomous vehicles, but the next mega-particle-collider in Geneva is also promoted with promises that it will reveal the mysteries of the origins of the universe—but there is also normative pressure. Everyone is compelled to take part in the game, expectations are institutionalized by reproduction in political discourse and by continuous use as political assets, and so the practice spreads. Generalized expectations, such as the promise that innovation produces economic growth and job creation, become subliminal points of reference for all actors in the field of innovation policy, as predicted by neo-institutionalists (e.g. DiMaggio and Powell 1983). The system-wide outcome of this process is that society as a whole begins to expect nothing less of innovation policy than that it makes promises of further job creation and further economic growth, in a never-ending spiral of more and more grandiosity. Everything must be (presented as) better, faster, and stronger—otherwise it fails miserably to gain any attention in the noise.

The phenomenon is neither new nor restricted to any specific part of society. Already in 1961, historian Daniel Boorstin published the book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, where he demonstrated that a shortage of interesting news stories of the sort that the readership of the major newspapers in the United States in the immediate post-World War II increasingly expected, created a market for “pseudo-events”. The logic of a pseudo-event, argued Boorstin (1961: 11), is that it is planned or incited by someone with the explicit purpose that it is “reported or reproduced”, but that its “relation to the underlying reality of the situation is ambiguous”. Alvesson (2013/2022) argues that “pseudo-events, pseudo-actions, and pseudo-structures” are increasingly prevalent in current society. They comprise of structures and patterns of behavior that are manifest and formalized, but only have symbolic importance. They should not be confused with the pure symbolism of ceremonial events and structures in society like commemorative celebrations, guards of honor, and awards, from which nobody expects any tangible consequences. Pseudo-structures involve pretensions of realness and consequentiality. Examples highlighted by Alvesson are “quality-assurance projects, committees, leadership programmes, many political ‘reforms’, organizational changes, and so on” (Alvesson 2013/2022: 16).

Organizations use pseudo-events all the time, in their advertising and the building of their reputation, sometimes to exaggerate the quality or attractiveness of what they sell, and sometimes to divert attention away from some irregularity or immorality in their operations. Social scientists, and especially organization scholars, have for many years documented and analyzed this, noting how attention to the (public) image and internal and external communication take up increasingly larger portions of resources within organizations today. While, as Brunsson (1989/2002) convincingly argued, this gap can be a great resource for organizations who need to balance conflicting interests from different stakeholders (Chap. 1), it also risks leading to deteriorating quality or efficiency of core operations due to misplaced priorities, and the spread of cynicism, disbelief and alienation spreads among employees and many other crucial stakeholder groups (e.g. Schwartz 1991; Gabriel 2005, 2008; Alvesson 2013/2022; Graeber 2015; Spicer 2013, 2018).

Events and structures very much akin to pseudo-events and pseudo-structures play crucial roles in reproducing society’s obsession with innovation and all its manifestations. Studies have shown how events play especially important roles in forming and maintaining the relationships between the actors that are engaged in building and upholding regional innovation systems and similar constellations mandated by the current interpretation of what innovation policy is supposed to be about (Lovering 1999: 379–380). The idea of such events, where innovation elites meet and reproduce discourse, is not to formulate policy or work out solutions for stimulating innovation in a region or sector, let alone accomplish such innovation, but to “transform the mindsets of the stakeholders, and to reaffirm and maintain the policy domain’s position on the political agenda” (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 311). But the problem is, as we have seen in previous chapter, far wider. Billions of Euros and Dollars are continuously poured into projects, investments, and institutions that reproduce innovationism and the ideologically tainted beliefs in the entrepreneurial state. The current political climate seems to be favoring demonstrations of initiative and power of action in the face of grand challenges and the expectations and fears of the electorate, almost at any cost. The lure is great for politicians to engage in active innovation policymaking: Promising a better, faster, stronger economy and promising to achieve it with their initiatives. This obsession with innovation seems to be a powerful shaper of collective identity among politicians, bureaucrats, and business leaders (Valaskivì 2012: 148), and a powerful mandate to act.

The Entrepreneurial State

Innovation and entrepreneurship can (and will) create jobs, grow the economy, solve grand challenges, and make us richer and happier and more advanced. At least so they say. Any decision maker, taking part in promoting this view of innovation as a cure-all, will look for a role for themselves to play in the fulfillment of these expectations and promises, in order to gain popularity or at least not appear as passive or out of touch with current times.

The idea of the entrepreneurial state, briefly mentioned in previous chapters and especially popularized in recent years by Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato, seems to give policymakers on all levels strong incentives to take action and use the tools available to them, to promote and achieve innovation: Big investments and programs to strengthen specific sectors and boost the development of specific technologies.

The political logic of promises and expectations is of course not part of the theoretical underpinning of the idea of the entrepreneurial state. Ultimately, it rests on one of the central tenets of the modern economic sciences, namely market failure. In its general use, market failure means any occasion where the profit interest of a firm, or the self-interest of an individual, is insufficient to accomplish what is perceived to be the greater good in economic terms, which leads to an overall net loss of economic value (Stiglitz 1989). Specifically for research and development (R&D), whose immediate results are often far from commercialization, the argument is that the non-excludability of much knowledge produced through R&D makes firms less prone to invest in R&D than would be optimal from the point of view of a whole sector or society at large (Nelson 1959; Arrow 1962). By extension, the non-excludability of (much) knowledge makes it a positive externality, which means that it will be of benefit to others in addition to those who invested in its development. These are the theoretical rationales, at least as expressed in the economic sciences and innovation studies, for governments to invest in R&D: no one else will, and the value of R&D itself, as well as through the expected spillovers from it, is important for governments to ensure.

But market failure is a theoretical argument and therefore a hypothesis (Ridley 2020: 273–274), which makes it problematic in two ways. First, any empirical study to confirm or refute the hypothesis of market failure will have to study both the supposed failure itself, and efforts to balance it, which will make it counterfactual and thus methodologically problematic. Studies of this type do exist, but are—quite unsurprisingly—inconclusive: It is difficult, at best, to judge whether government interventions to balance market failure in R&D work or not (e.g. Zúñiga-Vicente et al. 2014; Gustafsson et al. 2016). Second, the market failure hypothesis is also empirically flawed: The supposed non-excludability of knowledge, meaning that anyone can copy what you do in R&D, which nullifies any so called first-mover advantage, is simply not correct. No one can (normally) copy the results of R&D—for the second mover, it takes almost as much skill and hard work to absorb new knowledge as it took for the first mover to produce it in the first place, if not more (Kealey 1996: 230ff). First-mover advantages are, it turns out, significant enough for firms to actually invest substantially in R&D, which they also do (Rosenberg 1990).

But the real question is whether governmental innovation policy aimed at subsidizing innovation, and balancing market failure, really works. In a fundamental sense, the “knowledge problem” famously identified by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek (1945) makes the endeavor very challenging, as it puts into doubt whether any uniform policy or intervention, in any society with some level of complexity, can be efficient. The knowledge deficit of any centrally placed actor, in relation to the actors on the field, makes prioritizing difficult. Also a state with the greatest corporativist integration of varieties of special interests will have a disadvantage compared to more dynamic systems (like scientific fields and markets) when it comes to problem choice, problem formulation, and evaluation of possible solutions. Put differently, and somewhat exaggeratedly (in order to clarify the basic argument), no state actor can have an overview of all ideas being pursued by innovators out there that is sufficient to make the choices that are necessary to pick the winners (Sandström and Alm 2022). It has been tried, not without (some partial) success, but with disastrous consequences in broader and long-term perspective. The huge investments in R&D in the Soviet Union were, for the most part, centrally planned and were ultimately motivated by military aims. They produced scientific research of high quality—for one thing, quite a few Nobel Prizes were awarded to Soviet researchers, well into the 1970s—and also some innovation, but in both respects this system was clearly inferior to any country in the West that had a more pluralist and dynamic system. As we will return to in the final chapter of this book, innovation is unpredictable and rather disorganized, and can really only be achieved by fostering pluralism and variation. As summarized by Matt Ridley (2020: 280), “to pretend that government is the main actor in this process, let alone one with directed intentionality, is an essentially creationist approach to an essentially evolutionary phenomenon.”

Lavish arguments aside, the problem of choosing what areas to bet on, and what firms and innovation projects should receive subsidies, is a practical problem for any aspiring entrepreneurial state. Corporate R&D suffers from similar challenges when sizing up and reaching higher levels of complexity, but the limited “ownership competence” (Murtinu et al. 2022) of the state is more problematic given that it operates with resources that are the results of the hard labor of others, which makes wasteful spending particularly wasteful.

The knowledge problem is but one exponent of what could very well be called “government failure” to counterbalance the hypothesis of “market failure”. Politics is, in and of itself, a struggle between different special interests. These special interests will take every opportunity to benefit from policies that they can have influence over (Niskanen 1975). On a general level, any policy measure will therefore run the risk of being captured by special interests, which means that rather than aiming for utility maximization on overall societal level, it will aim for utility maximization on individual or group level.

Purposive social action always has unintended consequences, changing the behavior of those it is aimed at (Merton 1936) and incentivizing beneficiaries of rewards or subsidies to adapt to terms and conditions rather than aspiring to quality or competitiveness in a broader or general sense (e.g. Muller 2018: 19–20). Direct and indirect subsidies handed out by public sector organizations tend to lead both public and private actors and entities in innovation systems to reorganize their efforts so as to maximize their eligibility for funding, and realign their activities to fit specific aims and purposes. Studies have shown that government subsidies tend to go to those who are good at applying for them, or lobbying for them, rather than those who need them (Karlson et al. 2021: 85). Programs are, allegedly, routinely “hijacked” by special interests so that resources are diverted away from intended goals and to “boosting cronies of the nation’s rulers or legislators” (Lerner 2009: 11). Other studies have demonstrated that entrepreneurs who are productive enough on their own are not only in no need for these types of grants, but indeed abstain from applying at all, and instead use their effort on increasing their productivity (Gustafsson et al. 2020). This seems to imply an inverse correlation between productivity and effort put into acquiring grants.

Here, a word of caution. As has been repeated several times in this book, there is no simple and straightforward way of evaluating the prospects or outcomes of an effort to innovate, and hence it is also misguided to try to simply judge the usefulness or profitability of an idea or a project based on the level of productivity of a single entrepreneur and the level of governmental subsidies to that same entrepreneur. It might very well be that in the very long run, subsidized innovation is the most beneficial from overall societal point of view. The problem, highlighted by Gustafsson et al. (2020: 459–460), is the seeming risk of emergence of a class of “subsidy entrepreneurs”, who “find it relatively profitable to engage in grant-seeking activities compared to market production”, and hence undertake “an unproductive form of entrepreneurship”. Analogous to “rent-seeking”, i.e. the systematic attempts by firms to increase their profits not by increasing their productivity but influencing public policy to give out subsidies, imposing tariffs, and the like (Krueger 1974; Helm 2010), such “grant-seeking” diverts resources from core operations including R&D and to applying for subsidies, creating an artificial and self-sustaining economy of subsidies for low productivity.

It should not have to be underscored that public sector bureaucracies are not spared from free-rider problems, nepotism, moral hazard that comes from information advantages of specialist civil servants over elected officials (and electorates), and other similar problems on individual level (Niskanen 1971, 1975). Quite the opposite, it is likely for such challenges to quickly and forcefully present themselves and compromise the theoretically very promising idea that firm subsidies neatly correct market failures and spur innovation in the private sector to the benefit of society as a whole (Gustafsson et al. 2016). There is also much to suggest that several peculiarities and nuisances of representative democracy have been accentuated in the past decades, as elections have come to be decided by the middle ground or the median voter, incentivizing leading politicians both on the right and on the left to focus on the interests of minorities in order to win elections. These minorities may both be very particular in their interests, and may shift rapidly. The result is often less actionable governments and a reduction of political initiative to a wide collection of special interests, more or less compatible with each other, and certainly not conducive of decisive action in urgent policy areas (Helm 2010).

The path-dependence of governmental support to certain areas should also not be underestimated. Efforts that first seemed very promising may, over time, prove to be less productive or even wasteful, but nonetheless kept in place. Politicians may be reluctant to make changes and remove inefficient policies in the fear that they are perceived as incompetent by the voters (Dur 2001), and keep programs and institutes in place simply in order to avoid taking the blame for major cuts in funding, and job losses, to specific sectors or regions (Kurth 1973: 139–145). Escalating commitment bias, sometimes called “the sunk costs fallacy”, also seems to contribute to a general inability to change a course of action and close down programs, also in the face of overwhelming evidence that they are inefficient and wasteful (Arkes and Blumer 1985; Whyte 1986). Once again, bear in mind that these problems are not restricted to the public sector but discernible in all large organizations.

There is no lack of studies that highlight the faults and inefficiencies of major governmental programs in specific areas that Mazzucato (2021) calls “missions”, and that are currently very popular among national governments and the European Commission. An important part of the complex task of lowering the emission of greenhouse gases has been the development of ethanol as an alternative fuel. Billions of Euros and Dollars have been invested, by public and private actors alike, on many places of the globe but most conspicuously in Europe and the United States. A sizeable ethanol industry began to develop in the United States already in the 1980s, but it took until the early 2000s before major governmental subsidies were introduced, and leading politicians started putting (part of) their faith in this alternative fuel as a means to combatting climate change (Skidmore et al. 2013). However, studies suggest that the environmental benefits of ethanol as a fuel will be comparably small, and that production and distribution costs outweigh benefits (Pimentel 2003; Hahn and Cecot 2009). A broad effort in Northern Sweden to make ethanol from cellulose began in the mid-1990s, with support from the national government and high ambitions to not only produce an environmentally friendly substitute for gasoline, but also to make a distant rural region competitive again. Millions of Euros have been spent by the Swedish government and by universities in the region, but promises from the CEO of the publicly owned firm in charge of the venture turned out to be empty: The technology was immature and results farther down the road than envisioned. To dampen the million-Euro-losses that had started to accumulate, the company began importing ethanol from Brazil, built plants in Poland and Hungary, and attempted to grow sugar canes for ethanol production in Tanzania, Mozambique, Ghana, and Togo (Sandström and Alm 2022: 254–257). In spite of this failure, the effort kept getting very positive media attention and received a number of local and international awards (Sandström and Alm 2022: 263). The example should be highlighted as a warning to anyone with plans to have the state act ‘entrepreneurially’.

The Innovationists

One of the peculiar features of the current innovation ideology (Valaskivì 2012; Godin and Vinck 2017; Vinsel and Russell 2020) is its regionalism or provincialism, which stands in some contrast with the otherwise frequently invoked ideas of globalization as a force of good. Regionalism has been an important factor for mobilizing initiative and enthusiasm around innovation since at least the late 1990s, when scholars specializing in economic geography began promoting a new view of regional development built around ideas of geographical proximity as conducive of innovation and development, and patterns of the spread of “tacit knowledge”, including the local concentration of talent and “spillover effects” from universities and high-tech industries (e.g. Morgan 1997; Cooke et al. 1997; Maskell et al. 1998). Its most high-flying variety was offered by celebrity consultant and university professor Richard Florida, whose theory of the “creative class” and its alleged habit of agglomerating in cities and regions with a high concentration of tolerance, talent, and technology became famous a few years into the 2000s (see e.g. Florida 2002). It has since sunk in popularity and been dismissed in systematic examinations as insufficiently underpinned and thus largely empty (Peck 2005; McGuigan 2009). But regionalism in innovation policy has not vanished, in spite of its paradoxical combination of globalism and territorialism (Hall and Löfgren 2017: 314).

While certainly an attractive and persuasive bundle of ideas that evidently has enough lure to gather large masses of powerful supporters in government, industry, and academia, there is much to suggest that in many aspects, the “regional innovation systems” approach is scientifically deficient and a poor guide for policymaking (Lovering 1999). Academic studies and consultancy reports in this tradition often convey a reductionist and generalist view on regional development, seemingly pretending as if all regions everywhere develop according to the same patterns. They thereby fail to take into account the geographical, political, cultural, social, and political specifics of regions, and pay little attention to what is actually taking place in terms of research and development (and training) in the universities, research institutes, and firms that are supposed to be the motors of these regions (Hallonsten 2016: 204–205). They use generalized and aggregate indicators and formulas for economic growth and productivity, transferring them over between contexts and extrapolating wildly (for a conspicuous example, see Hallonsten 2020: 139–140, 259ff). Above and beyond this, the models and the view of regional development promoted in these studies embody a central goal conflict that they fail to give any clue to how to resolve: Attempts to strengthen the competitiveness of regions usually come with ambitious plans to attract talent and competence from abroad, which presupposes a relative openness and free flow of people and knowledge across borders, something that the regionalists also usually pay lip service to. But the risk that people, knowledge, and talent flow the other way generally goes uncommented. Unless the talented and competent people are made to stay in the region, investments in them will mainly benefit other regions, to which they move and take up employment in the future. And even if these highly coveted people are convinced to stay for a long time, or forever, a fair degree of loyalty must be instilled in them if they are not to contribute to inadvertent “knowledge spillovers” into other regions elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the regionalism and the state interventionism seem to work politically. In the current political environment, targeted interventions and subsidies are apparently easy to justify. Which makes sense: The political economy of such active support is vastly different from that of removing barriers and counteracting the influence of special and vested interests: You get few or no enemies, but potentially many powerful friends, from giving out active support. The costs are shared by the anonymous collective of taxpayers. Removing barriers and combating vested interests, on the contrary, comes at substantial political costs in the shape of powerful enemies; moreover, the benefits are significantly less clear (Wennberg and Sandström 2022: 10).

But there are also other incentives. As already discussed, current society’s obsession with innovation makes up a strong political mandate, promising solutions to challenges and a better future for all, acquired through growth and job creation. The benefits of decisive political action—also for decision-makers personally—are significant: There is huge reward, not least socially, of being part of the innovation elite that gathers businesspeople, politicians, civil servants, academics, and consultants, join forces with them to achieve a dynamic regional innovation system—perhaps even “Europe’s most innovative region!”—under imaginative slogans and visionary artwork (Andersson Cederholm and Hall 2020). The collective identity of these elites is “innovationism” (Valaskivì 2012)—a belief system where ideas and shared convictions about innovation, what it is and what it means, forms the basis of activities, rather than concrete actions to achieve innovation.

The foundation for all this is of course the second and third generations of innovation policy, which build on the fundamental assumption it is systemic and inter-organizational, involving several actors in heterogeneous systems. The scientific foundation itself is robust (Freeman 1987; Lundvall 1992), and as a view of innovation, it carries just as much weight as any scholarly perspective. But when turned into policy, it has peculiar consequences. One is that it upholds and inspires an innovation elite, consisting of actors from many businesses and sectors, whose continuous interactions at events (or pseudo-events) and in projects are interpreted as action of consequence and importance (Valaskivì 2012: 150; Hall and Löfgren 2017: 314; Andersson Cederholm and Hall 2020: 1416). Since national governments, and the European Commission, view the interplay and interdependence between actors from different parts of society as a prerequisite for innovation, this means that firms, public authorities, universities, semi-academic research institutes, local and regional governments, and civil society organizations are all supposed to collaborate to achieve innovation and thus economic development (Hall 2019). The healthy competition of markets, and the necessary antagonism of politics, are both put out of play in these inter-organizational systems where actors are expected to cooperate and co-produce creative environments (or “spaces”, or “arenas”, or whatever is the word of the day) where innovation can thrive (Hall and Löfgren 2017). Whether or not such artificial collaborations are actually conducive of real innovation is not the issue. Ideas and beliefs about regional innovation systems, “clusters”, and “triple helix” constellations are more important than proper preconditions for real innovation. But the systemic view is also quite vague as basis for policy, and so continuous negotiation ensues (Hall 2019: 35), and projects easily become the only reliable and solid entities in the rather free-floating system of events and network relations that the innovation elites maintain. Innovation policy, and innovation itself, becomes projectified (Hall 2019), with chronic shortsightedness as a result.

Therefore, although policymakers, administrators, business leaders, consultants and academics can be expected to find their ultimate inspiration and reward in the accomplishments connected with their occupation, the social rewards and the accumulation of social capital by gaining access to e.g. prestigious social events and networks should not be underestimated as a factor in the complex of incentives that lure politicians to launch initiatives and projects, and sustain innovationism. It seems indeed as if the idea of the “entrepreneurial state” actually “gave policymakers what they needed, when they needed it”; providing politicians and government agencies with a “flattering message (…) highlighting them as heroes and visionaries” (Wennberg and Sandström 2022: 10). Mariana Mazzucato recounts the story herself, in the book Mission Economy, of how “public figures on two continents”—Democratic congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic senator Ed Markey in the United States, and president of the European Commission Ursula van der Leyen—took on “vision and leadership” and launched the U.S. “Green New Deal” and the “European Green Deal” (Mazzucato 2021: 139ff). In the latter case, Mazzucato advised the European Commission on the design and implementation of the program, which like its North American counterpart includes billions of Euros in subsidies and cheap loans to mission-oriented projects to develop sustainable technologies and cutting emissions, all with the overall aim “to make the EU economy and society carbon neutral by 2050” (Bongart and Torres 2022: 170; Karlson et al. 2021).

It would be comforting to believe that it would work. And there are a few conspicuous and successful examples in history, such as the Manhattan Project’s quest to build the first atomic bomb, or Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade, which were kept. But as Harford (2011: 91) argues, “these examples are memorable in part because they are unusual”. Moreover, there are many examples of groundbreaking scientific discoveries and transformative innovations that have been based on work that funders have turned down and advised against, and several cases where these authorities also later have humbly conceded that “we are glad you didn’t follow our advice” (Harford 2011: 105–108).

Move Fast and Break Things

The emperor of the new digital economy, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is famous for his business philosophy of “move fast and break things” that has reached prominence both in industry and among innovation policymakers (Taplin 2017), and spread an extreme view of innovation as something necessarily hasty and even thoughtless (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 6ff). There are two flaws with it.

First, institutions, standards, and maintenance are as important to innovation as are creativity and Heureka moments (to the extent that these at all exist). Maintenance sustains success, also in innovation, and it requires “good planning that takes an organization’s preexisting culture and values into account” (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 142). As development economist Albert Hirschman wrote in his renowned book The Strategy of Economic Development, “it is far easier to start an industry than to keep it operating efficiently over a period of several years” (Hirschman 1958: 39). While there is much relevance and reason to the argument that current society needs continuous innovation and growth to preserve its status quo and reproduce its structure (Rosa et al. 2017), any reasonable look at empirical evidence will also show that maintenance of existing structures and technologies is just as important to keep society going, as is innovation, renewal, and growth. Most of the technologies that surround us and that we crucially rely on for our daily life and for the functioning of society are old rather than new, and quite ordinary or even dull (Edgerton 2007). They “are not revolutionary, are not innovative in any significant way”, and in most cases, we rely on them in such fundamental ways that we certainly don’t want to see them “disrupted” by any “creative destruction” (Russell and Vinsel 2019: 255–256). But even more importantly, it is a mistake to view stability as the opposite of change. Rather, the two most often presuppose each other, and the maintenance of existing structures and technologies is therefore crucial for enabling innovation.

Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn (1959/1977) conceptualized the “essential tension” between innovation and conventionality: all knowledge claims must be novel in some sense in order to be relevant, but also conventional and adhere to existing knowledge and practice, in order to be comprehensible. Sociologist Robert Merton (1949/1968: 185ff) analyzed the tension between conformity and deviance on the basis of the fundamental sociological supposition of a duality of structure and (individual) action, and showed that constructive deviant behavior brings necessary and revitalizing renewal to societies when it takes place within existing institutions, and is done on basis of existing structures. Neo-institutional organization theorists later argued that all organizations are dependent on shared practices and norm systems that breed social legitimacy, which is crucial for survival on long and short term (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983), and that the stability of highly institutionalized settings, like formal organizations and the legal frameworks and other practices they rely on, is conducive of innovation and change (e.g. Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000; Mahoney and Thelen 2010). Stable institutions, and standards, are absolutely necessary in order for variety and development to occur and be useful.

The role of standards and standardization in technological innovation has been studied in some influential works, not least the emergence of “dominant designs” and conventions in the manufacturing and use of technology (Utterback 1994; Bijker 1995). Recently, the dichotomy of standards and innovation, and how standards matter crucially in innovation processes, have been acknowledged and discussed in greater detail, on basis of both theorizing and empirical investigation (e.g. Hawkins et al. 2017). As the president of the American Standards Association reportedly argued in 1924, standards are “the liberator that relegate problems that have already been solved to the realm of the routine” (McCray 2016). In itself, therefore, this “liberator” is a core driver of innovation and progress, because it enables innovators to move on to new things, and to use existing technologies in their search for new knowledge.

The second flaw of the “move fast and break things” idea of innovation is in one sense more self-evident: All creative and truly transformative work requires deep reflection (Honoré 2004; Berg and Seeber 2016). Innovation, specifically, is something that usually both takes time and is unpredictable, which means it must be pursued with patience and a pragmatic flexibility toward unexpected turns of events. Innovation is “nearly always a gradual, not a sudden thing” (Ridley 2020: 240), and usually includes applying knowledge and judgment methodically to solve problems in a real and deeper sense and with a holistic view. Although sudden and ground-breaking innovation sometimes occurs, it is much more often “experimental” in nature, meaning that it proceeds by trial and error, through collaboration and recombination, over long time, much like art produced by old masters after along life of experimentation and refinement of their talent (Galenson 2006). Rather than to “move fast and break things”, therefore, innovation is typically achieved through the craft ideal to “do a job well for its own sake” (Sennett 2009: 9). But the economy of today seems instead to draw us all into “a system that is too fluid and mobile for the desire to do something well for its own sake” (Hasu et al. 2012: 88).

This “speed imperative” threatens long-term and profound renewal, in that it dramatically shrinks the capacity for critical reflection and deep engagement with problems and their solutions (Hasu et al. 2012: 93). The digital economy and its constant flow of fast information accentuate this problem and deepen the risks that deliberation is abolished in favor of the shallow. “Online or off, we become overly focused on finding new information, while our motivation to dig deeply into the content at hand diminishes. We become more distractible, less able to differentiate the meaningful from the merely stimulating” (Roberts 2015: 123).

But the shortsightedness that plagues current society also has a purely economized side, namely, what Paul Roberts has called financialization. This means, “the way the mind-set of the financial sector becomes the mind-set of the culture at large” (Roberts 2015: 105), but also the view within business that everything other than maximized short-term financial gains is “inefficiencies to be minimized or eliminated entirely with cost-cutting technologies and lean strategies” (Roberts 2015: 9). Managers today tend to “cut everything possible” and maximize the profits of shareholders (and themselves), instead of reinvesting in their companies, and there is an alleged broad acceptance in politics and society at large that cutbacks in order to grow profits on short term are both reasonable and responsible action (Roberts 2015: 51–52). Surveys have shown that executives are ready to delay or evade investing in projects with likely long-term profits, and cut spending on research and development and maintenance if it would help them meet the earning targets of the current quarter (Roberts 2015: 94).

Investors, whose role in funding innovation projects has traditionally been very important, seem to have similarly changed their expectations to shorter time frames, and formed what Bennett Harrison calls “impatient capital” (Harrison 1994: 214). As an example, Richard Sennett (2006: 40) notes that whereas in 1965 American pension funds held stocks on an average for 46 months, by 2000 much in the portfolios of these institutional investors turned over on an average of 3.8 months. Investors detached from the operations of the companies they invest in, usually pension funds and other investment funds, are nowadays what Erixon and Weigel (2016) call “gray capital”, caring significantly less about what companies actually do, and increasingly more about only making financial gains as fast as possible. This is, however, not the only feature of the current global business landscape that favors shortsightedness over long-term planning and the superficial over the profoundly transformative. Managerialism (Chap. 3) has brought the triumph of “organization men” over entrepreneurs and creative free-thinkers, and favors short-term profits that can be easily presented in quarterly reports and shown to superiors, and so the “talk about agile adaptation, disruption, and revolutionary innovation” remains just talk (Erixon and Weigel 2016: 16).

Just as with the institutionalization of expectations in the science policy system’s prioritization games (above), managerial shortsightedness is infectious, and sold to companies by consultants who live off quick returns. American giants like Enron and Sunbeam are examples of companies becoming “dysfunctional or corrupt” after falling prey to elaborate plans of attracting “empowered investors” that are after “short-term rather than long term results” and need to be seduced by empty talk and dazzling surfaces (Sennett 2006: 39–41). Apparently, stock markets react positively when companies adopt the latest management fashion, regardless of its suitability or correspondence with real needs of the organization in question (Nicolai et al. 2010). The growing habit of major companies to purchase their own stock in so called “buybacks” is a very shortsighted way of increasing the company’s value, and was illegal in the United States until 1982. Buybacks takes shares out of circulation and means that the supply of remaining shares is artificially restricted which drives up the price, and quickly became a way for managers to boost share price (and, in many cases, their own bonuses) swiftly and efficiently without having to invest in new business activities or make other costly interventions. Today, it is not uncommon for tech giants like Microsoft to spend more on share buybacks than on R&D (Roberts 2015: 157). Clearly, the shortsightedness of financialization of the corporate world is a potential threat to real innovation, but goes together surprisingly well with empty innovation.