Keywords

There is a paradox in the historical development of innovation and society’s view on innovation: The growing obsession in the past few decades, and the rise of innovationism, seems not to have coincided with an intensification of real innovation. In fact, there are signs that the correlation even is negative.

Chapter 2 of this book showed that society’s view on innovation as a cure-all is rather new. Meanwhile, real innovation must have happened constantly during times when innovation was a word with negative connotations. It flourished in times when innovation was acknowledged by scholars and pundits as important to social and economic development but not something governments and other decision-makers and pundits needed to meddle directly with, and certainly not talk about all the time, in fancy slogans, glossy brochures, and grandiose strategy documents. Put differently, when hard work was put into innovation—and a lot of hard work is usually needed to really innovate—it seemed to have gone quite well and innovation was the main force to push our societies forward in a rather astonishing economic and social progress. But when effort instead has been increasingly directed at talking about innovation, launching projects and programs to spur innovation, and hold events about innovation, there seems to be far less action. In one way, this makes perfect sense: In organizations whose resources are limited—and most organizations’ resources are—every minute and every thought spent on empty innovation means one minute and one thought less spent on real innovation.

Benoît Godin, who has chronicled and analyzed the development and transformation of innovation’s place in society in greater detail than anyone else, concludes that the legitimacy and authority that innovation has today is almost incontestable, and historically unprecedented (Godin 2015: 3). However, the way the concept of innovation is used today, in practical policy- and decision-making, is far too abstract, general, and superficial for it to capture anything of consequence. Innovation is today, to significant degrees, an empty policy concept that risks being counterproductive or harmful for the economy and for greater society. Throughout this book, a number of historical developments have been outlined and analyzed that hopefully can help explaining how it has come to be this way. Economization, managerialism, bureaucratization, the growing role of expectations and promises in policymaking, the shortsightedness produced by social acceleration and seen especially in consumer markets and in the financialization of the business world and of politics, all arguably contributed to a situation where it is apparently more important to talk about innovation than to do real innovation. In other words, a society where innovation has become empty.

In this final chapter, we will first outline some possible harmful consequences of all this, thus summarizing the argument that society’s obsession with the new is an unsustainable condition and counterproductive for real innovation. Thereafter, we will look to alternatives, discussing what innovation really is and how it really works, and use this as a basis for laying out a path forward, where innovation ceases to be empty and retakes its role as crucial factor for progress.

Consequences

The politicians, bureaucrats, businesspeople, and academics that take part in the perpetuation of society’s obsession with innovation, all have in common that they view innovation in very positive terms—arguably, too positive—and seem to believe in an almost magical capacity of innovation and entrepreneurship to create jobs, grow the economy, solve sustainability challenges, and make life better for everyone. This overconfidence has metamorphosed into “innovationism”, a belief system or ideology that is conceptually distinct from innovation in a real or technical sense (Valaskivì 2012: 133). Innovationism has no intrinsic capacity to improve anything. Quite the opposite: It entails a strong appeal to national or regional identity (Chap. 5), combined with a constantly invoked message of competitiveness. This means that on a very subtle level, it risks turning its over-positive message into a rhetoric of fear of falling behind in the highly competitive and globalized knowledge economy. Innovation is often presented as the only means for national (or regional) survival in a hostile world. It is not uncommon for this to be summarized with the catchy but rather intimidating phrase “innovate or die” (Hasu et al. 2012: 90). In this sense, innovationism is fundamentally dishonest, as it pretends to play on feelings of optimism but breeds a worry of being left behind (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 11). Such a rhetoric of fear, especially if indirectly deployed using grandiose slogans and a dazzling surface, is arguably counterproductive both on overall societal level, in the long run, and specifically in relation to those young minds that are necessary to encourage and stimulate to innovate.

Other destructive consequences of innovationism, and of society’s obsession with entrepreneurship and growth, are of course more plain and concrete. Among the most obvious ones—already hinted in previous chapters—are wasteful spending. The huge and centrally planned programs of “the entrepreneurial state” (Chaps. 2 and 5), have been amply criticized on theoretical and empirical grounds. Especially questionable is the seeming lack of efficiency with which the programs launched under the auspices of the entrepreneurial state ideology do actually support technological development and sustainability transitions (Harford 2011; Karlson et al. 2021; Wennberg and Sandström 2022; Larsson 2022). Similarly, the entrepreneurship industry (Chap. 4) seems to be a formidable source of free money for those capable of selling a product of service to these would-be-entrepreneurs. Veblenian entrepreneurship—amounting to the “conspicuous consumption” of such products or services to maintain a particular lifestyle (Hartmann et al. 2020)—becomes really problematic when taxpayers’ money or private capital are spent to support such lifestyles, under the pretext that it is spent to support the development of the economy (Brattström 2022: 148).

But the risk of goal displacement—ultimately connected to the Hayekian “knowledge problem” (Chap. 5) and the slim chances of centrally placed bureaucrats or other decision-makers to have the competence to bet on the right horses—is far more consequential. Not only does it add to the problem of wasteful spending. In the long run, goal displacement means in all likelihood that society is robbed of great ideas and great innovations, simply because government subsidies go to those skilled at applying for them, squeezing out the really promising projects, individuals, and ventures.

Another form of goal displacement is the risk of lack of proper attention to maintenance of existing infrastructures, technologies, and institutions, which is crucial for humanity and society, and its use of technology (Russell and Vinsel 2019: 249–250). Innovationism tends to actively devalue all those vital infrastructures, technologies, and institutions that do not benefit from disruption and creative destruction—and the work of all those who keep them running—but also to ruin the capacity of these institutions and infrastructures and people to form the foundation on basis of which real innovation can occur. Empty innovation is therefore empty in two major respects: There is not much real innovation going on, and not much maintenance of the institutions and infrastructures that can enable people to make it happen anyway.

The entrepreneurship industry, and the “conspicuous consumption” of Veblenian entrepreneurship, suffers from essentially the same type misconception: that innovation and entrepreneurship is all about the heureka moments—it is not (see below)—and the spectacular achievements of charismatic individuals. It therefore ultimately rests on the widespread bundle of myths, around what entrepreneurship is and how it works, that Shane (2008) and others effectively shattered (Chap. 4), and that have also been shown to strongly contribute to entrepreneurial failure. The images and cultural beliefs produced by the entrepreneurship industry may not enable prospective entrepreneurs to make better decisions and take better action—quite the opposite, they may very well hinder prospective entrepreneurs from realistic self-evaluations of their real abilities to enterprise because they simply show a false image and a false ideal to strive for.

If people believe entrepreneurship myths, and act on these myths, this creates significant risks for individuals and their surroundings. Anyone considering starting a business or otherwise venturing to do something out of the ordinary must have as solid, complete, and accurate information as possible about the prospects and the road ahead. If entrepreneurial efforts are based on false and over-optimistic conceptions about what it takes to succeed—or, indeed just what it takes to get going—and fail to acknowledge what the alternatives and opportunity costs are (Shane 2008), we have a recipe for disaster. Therefore, as Brattström (2022: 151) argues, “it is important that aspiring entrepreneurs enter the entrepreneurship industry with their eyes open”. Which they don’t, currently, at least not enough. For the individuals involved, the consequence can be dire, but also procreate across society. Shattered dreams and disillusionment may seem like small matters in the grander scheme of things, but when they add up, they become the grander scheme of things.

Misunderstandings

Innovation was always about challenging the status quo, and as the historical exposé in Chap. 2 showed, different societies have viewed this differently. Today, however, it seems innovation itself is the new status quo. Current society runs on “dynamic stabilization” (Rosa et al. 2017), meaning that it needs constant innovation—or at least constant appearance of innovation—to be able to preserve our way of life and the stability of our societies:

“Without expansion, innovation and accumulation, companies close down, jobs are lost, and, by consequence, public revenues decrease and expenditures increase, and the ensuing monetary and fiscal crisis can put political legitimation at risk, too. […] Thus, capitalist economies do not need growth or innovation to achieve some new goal or progressive state, but just in order to keep the status quo and to reproduce their structure. Without it, they lose their economic competitiveness and their social stability.” (Rosa et al. 2017: 54)

This implies that growth curves must be exponential, which itself is unsustainable. The conclusion, however, that unsustainable growth and escalation is the new normal for our societies, builds on a very narrow and shortsighted understanding of innovation as something that can be planned by politicians, carried out by charismatic entrepreneurs, and commercialized with a swift turnover to maximize revenue for the local or regional economy, and the state within whose borders it is located, so that this state and the region it prides itself with having developed (or even created) can advance on some ranking list of high scores on some shallow metric of global competitiveness or similar. Hartmut Rosa’s critique of modern and late-modern society’s dependence on continuing innovation and continuing growth, and the unsustainable state of this “dynamic stabilization”, points out several flaws with the current economy, but is nonetheless overly generalized and indiscriminate. It is important that the role that economization and the spread of the enterprise culture (Chap. 3) play in making innovation empty are criticized without conflating these developments with innovation as such.

Because innovation is not only a process that makes rich societies even richer, at the expense of poorer people elsewhere and eventually also at the expense of the planet itself. Innovation—real innovation—is also a way of distributing wealth to the poor, and of limiting industrial exploitation of natural resources. Similarly, economic growth is not only a perverse objective of ruthless politicians and business leaders who—quite absurdly—are not content with their affluence but still compete for even more. Sure, this type of ruthless hunting of further economic growth for its own sake is a main cause not only of empty innovation (as explicated in this book), but also exploitation and waste. But economic growth is also an unavoidable consequence of innovation in its most fundamental and important sense—the “process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance” (Ridley 2020: 2) to the benefit of humanity and the world—and therefore economic growth can obviously also be caused by the good, the humane, the constructive, and the profoundly enriching. Put differently, neither innovation or economic growth should in themselves be demonized nor condemned. Empty innovation, and economic growth as an end in itself, should.

Innovation is good, if it is understood correctly and promoted carefully and thoughtfully. We will return shortly, in the next section, with a systematic discussion of how innovation really works and some suggestions of how it can thus be promoted. Let us first ponder briefly why it is that there are so many misconceptions out there, that prevent a successful and balanced innovation policy in government and organizations.

Chapter 4 discussed at length the entrepreneurship ideal and its probable roots and causes in the extreme individualism of our society, and the crowning of individual self-fulfillment as the ultimate goal for people and societies. An integral part of this profound cultural expression of our times is the elevation of individual achievement and momentous breakthroughs to a high cultural standing. We all seem to love the story of the lone genius, working against all odds and stunning us all with some masterpiece artwork, athletic feat, or breakthrough technical solution. The people that play the main parts in such stories are, furthermore, just as prone as anyone else to try to magnify their own importance and downplay the role of competitors and predecessors (Ridley 2020: 244). The stories of the lone geniuses are, moreover, not only expressions of popular culture, but seem also to answer to a great need of humans, and humanity as a whole, for simplifications and generalizations. This makes the message rather easily sold: Innovation and entrepreneurship are depicted as things you can learn, do, promote, evaluate, and appreciate in general terms and with exclusively positive connotations. Put differently, while it may be impossible to find or write recipes for innovation and entrepreneurship, it is still possible to sell such recipes, and there is apparently a major market for them. This goes for the universal solutions offered by economization and managerialism (Chap. 3), the services and products of the “entrepreneurship industry” (Chap. 4), the promises of political campaigns (Chap. 5), and the pretention that major challenges to our societies, even our whole civilization, can and should be solved by implementing a “mission economy” where governments or supra-national bodies like the European Commission point the way and allocate billions of Euros to “sustainability transitions” and the like (Chap. 5).

The latter point is but one of many indications that our current research policy and funding system, and the whole array of infrastructures to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in society, are set up to not stimulate innovation at all. They are usually over-bureaucratized, incarnating the fundamental principle of administrative rationality, namely control, predictability, and risk-avoidance. They are set up to support and fund a continuous stream of “can’t-go-wrong” projects, with “more emphasis on forestalling failure than achieving success” (Harford 2011: 109). Managers, funding agencies, and politicians usually want swift turnover of their money and quick proofs that they made the right decision, and are therefore prone to make safe bets and support the predictable. This means simply adding pieces to a puzzle, which is a pragmatic approach to discovery, invention, and innovation that will be successful in the short run but eventually run out of steam and moreover, bore us all to death.

Betting on the safe and the easily evaluable often means losing the truly innovative. The intentions behind may be sincere, but the outcomes are meager or worse—a dazzling surface and a theater of dreams, with nothing of substance behind it, only an endless waste of money, talent, and effort.

“Politicians believe that innovation can be turned on and off like a tap” (Ridley 2015: 133). We should not believe them. In fact, we should refute any claim, from anyone, that they are able to increase the rate and quality of innovation in general (Vinsel and Russell 2020: 36). For that ever to work, innovation—real innovation—is way too serendipitous, gradual, collaborative, evolutionary, and unpredictable.

Real Innovation

The Hollywood movie Charlie Wilson’s War pictures the collaboration of US congressman Charlie Wilson and CIA operative Gust Avrakotos to arm the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s, which became an important feature of US foreign policy under the name the Reagan Doctrine, arming anticommunist and anti-Soviet resistance movements across the world (Downing 2018: 110). Toward the end of the movie, Avrakotos (portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman) tries to caution Wilson (Tom Hanks), not to jump to conclusions regarding the virtue of their effort to help chasing the Soviets out of Afghanistan, by supplying them with heavy armory to shoot down helicopters:

“Listen, not for nothing, but do you know the story of the Zen master and the little boy? There is this little boy, and on his fourteenth birthday he gets a horse. Everybody in the village say, ‘How wonderful, the boy got a horse!’ The Zen master says, ‘We’ll see.’ Two years later, the boy falls off the horse and hurts his leg and everyone in the village says, ‘How terrible!’ The Zen master says, ‘We’ll see.’ Then, a war breaks out, and all the young men have to go off and fight, except the boy can’t because his leg is all messed up. Everyone in the village says, ‘How wonderful!’ The Zen master says, ‘We’ll see.’”

The true origins of this fable-like story are unknown, but by all accounts, it is very ancient. Varieties exist in Confucian and Daoist teaching, as well as in the bible and in several classical works of Western literature (including Shakespeare), and the moral can be summarized with the blessing in disguise proverb.

The chief lesson in the present context is of course that human achievement, be it based on individual creativity and ambition or on societal progress (in most cases, it is both at the same time), is inherently unpredictable. But the Zen master and the Boy fable can be of further great help, because it is also crucial to acknowledge that success and failure are not one another’s opposites or mutually excluding, which is how contemporary culture unfortunately often picture them, but difficult to distinguish or even the prerequisites of one another.

Though probably true in most areas of life, the inseparability of success and failure is particularly evident in scientific research and adjacent work of improving human understanding and control of the physical and social world—in other words, innovation. To a great extent, science and technological development live off failure—in short, without failure there would simply be no science and no technological progress, for two fundamental reasons. First of all, one has to fail many times to be able to succeed. According to a proverb attributed to Henry Ford, failure enables one to start over more intelligently (Farson and Keyes 2002: 30). Being wrong, no matter how much it makes us feel idiotic and ashamed, is integral to human cognition. “Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world” (Schultz 2010: 5). Second, it is also the case that unknown successes are hidden and only possible to expose with failure (Firestein 2016: 19). To those truly interested in innovating, mistakes are hardly ever really mistakes but rather markers on a map, that indicate where not to go. Quite obviously, such markers are just as important as those that can point in the right direction (Farson and Keyes 2002: 33). Hence the really imaginative and contributory work that will amount to groundbreaking innovation that will change the lives of people to the better, or perhaps even society as a whole, can never be easily appraised in terms of success or failure, at least not on short term. What looks insignificant or even wasteful with a short time frame, can turn out to be momentous in longer perspective. This is true in science, in technological development, and on free markets where corrections of errors—consumers discarding bad products and services, and producers withdrawing them and returning later with a better solution—hinges upon failures and mistakes (Farson and Keyes 2002: 38). Let us repeat the thought experiment of chapter 1: Was anyone capable of gauging the societal impact of the transistor at the time of its invention in the 1940s? Of course not. Even decades later, by any measures, this impact was marginal in comparison with what was to come, with the microchip and the industrial revolution it brought. Does anyone today doubt the impact of the invention of the transistor? Hardly. Backed up by this example and many others like it, Amara’s law—that the impact of technology tends to be underestimated in the long run (Searls 2012: 7)—should give us reason to be cautious with our judgments on short term.

But also on short term, unpredictability is an important factor. Serendipity, the impact of unplanned events in any planned process, is an intuitive concept and intriguing phenomenon, but also an analytical concept. Sociologically, serendipity is viewed as a mechanism by which human individual cognition interacts with its social environment to produce the unexpected. Importantly, as scholars of serendipity Robert Merton and Ellinor Barber concluded, “the unexpected occurs twice over in the serendipity pattern”, when “an unanticipated observation yields an unanticipated kind of new knowledge” (Merton and Barber 2004: 236). Nassim Nicholas Taleb has phrased it somewhat more radically, claiming that “almost no discovery, no technologies of note, came to design and planning”, but from the unexpected. His conclusion is instructive. Innovators and entrepreneurs should “rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves” (Taleb 2007: xxv).

Appreciating that uncertainty, serendipity, and evolutionary patterns of development (including a predominant reliance on trial and error) are integral parts of innovation is the first fundamental step in understanding what innovation is and how it works (Basalla 1988; Arthur 2009; Harford 2011; Ridley 2015; Ridley 2020: 240ff). And such an understanding is of course the first step in any reasonably hopeful effort of understanding how innovation can be promoted in our society. To the dismay of most politicians, bureaucrats and business leaders, who rightly recognize the crucial importance of innovation and its transformative capacity for our society and therefore wants to be able to claim to have (had) a part in successful innovation, this also means that innovation is impossible to plan. This is perhaps even more so now, in the current globalized and digital economy, where constant recombination and trial and error makes successes and failures succeed each other at fast speed and considerable overlaps (Arthur 2009: 209–210). Meanwhile, entrepreneurship research has provided us with vast amounts of evidence to refute any claims that entrepreneurship follows a given logic, that entrepreneurs have specific personality traits, or that certain decisions or actions give certain outcomes in an entrepreneurial process (Shane 2008; Brattström 2022).

The x-factor, the unknown unknown, is a necessity for anything to become real innovation with real outcomes of real significance. And such an x-factor cannot be achieved in the type of conveyor belt operations that are made up of series of what Herbert Simon called programmed decisions, that is, repetitive and well-defined decision-making with clear procedures. Non-programmed decisions, in contrast, are decisions whose procedures are unknown and for which there are no predefined criteria for evaluating success (Simon 1960: 5–7). Many problems are simply unknown, and most aspects of known problems are unknown, which means that they lack both simple or optimal solutions (Arthur 2009: 209). Innovation is inherently unpredictable, and must be. Any attempt to fully control and contain it in predefined procedures, and to subject it to simplified and shortsighted assessment of success or failure, is counterproductive.

Meanwhile, it is crucial to acknowledge the social dimension of innovation. We touched upon it above: The lone genius is a myth. We are all, in some way, standing on the shoulders of giants and greatly indebted to our collaborators and competitors for their contributions to any achievement we credit ourselves for. Everything happens in a context, and creative work is especially contingent upon social arrangements and social exchanges ranging from the highly formalized (e.g. a contract on some physical premises where the work takes place) to the highly informal (e.g. the advice and support of trusted friends or colleagues). Also on the business side, any effort requires interaction with a whole range of actors—creditors, workers, suppliers, customers, authorities, and so on (Mokyr 2016: 16). Thus while innovation is often times rebellious, it is also about proceeding in small steps and with the help of others. Very successful and famous artists have witnessed about the crucial importance of the “critical friend” who you know will support you but also will tell it like it is (Tharp 2003, 2009), revealing the faults of one’s own thinking and the “latent errors” that are always built-in. If revealed at late stages, when tons of time, money and prestige have been invested, these errors can be catastrophic (Sloman and Fernbach 2017). With critical friends, and with the proper institutional arrangements that allow, encourage, and ensure critique, we can achieve truly “safe spaces to experiment” (Harford 2011: 280).

The most conspicuous flaw of the obsessive and superficial understanding of innovation in current society is the habit of presenting or thinking about innovation as something simple, predictable, and plannable. Innovation is nothing like that. Innovation is a complex, cumulative, and distributed process both in time and space, and most importantly, it is heterogeneous in terms of skill, knowledge, opportunity, and timeliness. Hardly ever is any substantial innovation, that in any way changes the lives of people to the better, undertaken by a sole individual or a single organization, no matter how much money and effort they invest. Innovation almost always happens in unpredictable chains of events, where someone makes an initial discovery or experiment, or tries a novel idea, whereas someone else develops the idea or refines the result, a third commercializes or puts to initial use some early version, a fourth improves the product or service or policy or plan to make it more efficient or useful or enjoyable. And so on. Along the way, customers or clients are involved with their demands and expectations, that spur improvements, and yet other actors and organizations provide the financial and material preconditions. Not to mention knowledge, be it specialized scientific training, engineering skills, market awareness, planning and leadership skills. Knowledge is always acquired from somewhere—a giant pool where new interconnections are as unpredictable as they are foreseeable.

Failure to take into account the wider context is tantamount to conveying a false image of innovation and its role in society. Rest assured that this wider context always involves the full complexity and unpredictability of social life.

The Alternative

Make no mistake: Innovation is crucially important in our society. If nothing else, overwhelming evidence can be found in a quick glance at history as we know it, and a quick comparison with present times. Although there is also atrocious suffering and shocking inequality in the world today, humanity is immensely better off than only a few decades ago, let alone one or a couple of centuries. If any key factor for this success is to be identified concisely, it will have to be technological and social innovation. Moreover, there is a lot to suggest that also the current challenges of humanity and modern society, such as climate change, sustainability in a broader perspective, and conflict of various types, can be solved only by the collected efforts of human creativity applied in socially structured and institutionalized processes, in other words, innovation. When the nature of the problems ahead are not known—and perhaps especially then—innovation is in all likelihood the answer. Therefore, there is absolutely nothing wrong in general or in principle with the belief that innovation is a kind of cure-all for society, but there are undoubtedly negative consequences of this belief or how it acts out in practice. Innovation has been emptied of its content, turned into a buzzword and cliché. This book has tried to clarify that this is a deep predicament, why it is so harmful, and what its likely causes are.

There are a number of flaws with what is usually called the third generation of innovation policy (Chap. 2), a policy doctrine based on a systemic view on innovation, the thesis of market failure, and the power of positive externalities. As discussed in Chap. 5, market failures are hypothetical and therefore empirically very tricky to study. They may exist, and it is highly likely that they exist, but it is hard (to say the least) to measure or approximate their size and significance. This creates a very dire challenge for any policymaker or bureaucrat. Their task becomes to try to solve a problem without knowing how big it is, where it is, and what its character is, having only a very limited set of tools at their disposal. More profoundly problematic is, however, that the systems approach to innovation is paradoxical as a basis for government intervention since complex systems by nature are ungovernable. Complex systems, of the sort Freeman (1987) and Lundvall (1992) picture that innovation occurs in—a very reasonable assertion—are heterogeneous and functionally differentiated and specialized far beyond what simplified models ever can manage to convey. It is therefore no surprise that innovation policy of the recent two to three decades has been based rather on a model of thought than an empirically verifiable understanding of the demands, challenges, and opportunities of innovation in the globalized and digital economy. As repeatedly discussed throughout this book, with proper reference to Hayek (1945), these demands, challenges, and opportunities are multifarious and complex down to the level of individual variation, and can therefore hardly be identified—let alone solved!—by any centrally placed actor in charge of making judgments and decisions. In this sense, the unrivaled power of the market economy is its constructive use of trial and error to constantly renew, optimize, and respond to needs as they emerge in likely and unlikely places and situations. Note that this assertion, though it appears to echo the market fundamentalism of neoliberal discourse, is really a humanist plea to let ideas and creativity flourish, and to let the pluralism it adds up to be the path of societal progress.

The same goes for incentives. If the interests of every individual actor were completely coherent with the overall interests of society—should the latter be even remotely possible to fully define—then perhaps innovation systems could be governed and steered to particular results. But as we know, individuals have diverging interests and their individual desires may also differ greatly with what society needs overall. The only known remedy to this dilemma is to construct stable and powerful institutions that encourage and facilitate innovation and entrepreneurship. This includes functioning markets, carefully balanced property rights protection, stable monetary policy, and legislation that favors competition and entrepreneurship, including the creative destruction that is harmful for special interests and damaging in the short run, but advantageous on overall level and on long term, in ways that can hardly ever be overlooked (Wennberg and Sandström 2022: 11). But the institution-building for the promotion of innovation—real innovation—does not restrict itself to predictable and stable conditions for entrepreneurship and business formation that are relatively laissez-faire and carry a neoliberal scent—indeed, such a free market utopia is perhaps not part of the solution at all—but is about a broad collection of institutional arrangements that encourage and enable creativity and trial-and-error efforts, including a strong education system, a healthy R&D system with protected academic freedom, balanced IP laws, and so on.

We should try new things, and encourage trying new things, but do so with the full knowledge and appreciation of the fundamental fact that some or even most new things will fail, and therefore also expect some to fail. In order for this to work without demoralizing innovators, we need to make failure survivable. This is accomplished by creating safe spaces for failure, and by encouraging moving forward in small steps and putting new ideas to a test (in safe spaces) at an early stage of their development, before too much has been invested in them and before too many alternatives have been dismissed by the sole mind, who is notoriously bad at recognizing the faults of her own ideas. The safe spaces for failure must include both the critical friend and an atmosphere of openness and generosity, so that failure can be recognized and pointed out. This includes going behind empty rhetoric, catchphrases, buzzwords, and innovationism. Empty talk and window-dressing might be an advisable strategy for organizations and actors in specific situations, as noted in the introduction to this book, but it is devastating for society as a whole, since it prevents many of the processes that promote and enable real innovation. Besides encouraging creativity, innovators must also be made aware when they have failed, otherwise they will never learn. Likewise, politicians and bureaucrats (and academic scholars!) must be scrutinized and their misguided efforts exposed for what they are, namely empty, misdirected, and wasteful. Ideas themselves must also be properly examined for their faults, because chances are pretty good that they are not outright failures, if scrutinized by critical friends interested in both spotting faults and highlighting merits of ideas. This way, everyone wins, especially in the long run.

What we need, in essence, is a better understanding of what innovation is, what it is not, and how it relates to the causalities and dynamisms of society, economy, individual and collective pursuits, how and if they should be stimulated, and why. We also need open debate and a critique that serves its purposes—to correct errors and call bluffs when emptiness and shallowness abounds, to serve a greater purpose. Social science can give us much of that. This book has made one contribution in such a vein.

While it is true that innovation is the source of all economic growth, the policy implication of this basic scholarly tenet is backward today: Governments act as if economic growth is the ultimate purpose of innovation, but fail to acknowledge how innovation really works and what it needs in terms of stimulation. This means that empty innovation fundamentally rests upon two misunderstandings on the level of policymakers and public administration. The first is that economic growth is desirable in and of itself, and thus that the purpose of innovation is to create economic growth. The second is that innovation as such can be planned and created and that the means to do this are known and available to policymakers and bureaucrats. As this book has shown, these two central policy-level misunderstandings have a broader resonance in society, and reciprocate with other historical developments including the emergence of the me generation and the growing role of immediate gratification in our culture, which seem to have been fomented by the digital revolution and the spread of social media in its wake. Many complex challenges face societies who want to get rid of empty innovation and reinstate real innovation in its place.

Finally, another note of caution. This book has developed a very critical view of innovation and entrepreneurship. There must be no confusion around the following: Real innovation, and individual innovators and entrepreneurs, are not the target of this critique. It is the emptiness of the currently very well-spread ideas about innovation and entrepreneurship, and the discourse that surrounds them, that must be recognized and battled. Real innovation is something genuinely good and necessary for our society. To the real innovators and entrepreneurs out there, I have therefore only this to say: Keep up the good work. We depend on you.