Abstract
For a few decades now, innovation—mainly derived from technological advances—has been considered a driving force of economic and societal development and prosperity. The dominant view is that, in the context of globalization, and the accompanying rise of international competition, OECD countries have a choice between two options: innovate or perish. However, the last two decades, which can be regarded as the golden age of innovation, saw a gradual shift in ideology. There has been indeed growing doubt about the relevance of the dominant model of innovation. This introductory chapter’s main goal is to analyze the conditions of a shift from a techno-centric society to a human-centric society, one where technology’s potential for positive impact is not disregarded, but where social and human well-being is central to realize this potential. Another goal is to discuss non-technological aspects of innovation and their importance in dealing with complex contemporary societal issues, while also making a critical assessment of the relationship between science, technology, innovation (STI) and society.
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Notes
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For example, skill-biased technologies is a concept that has been introduced to illustrate the fact that technologies are non-neutral and may help those who are educated enough in increasing their productivity, while they may hinder those who are less educated and therefore less able to benefit from new technologies such as computers or Internet.
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Representative of this approach is Lazonick’s work on the innovative firm, in which he shows that innovation cannot be analyzed independently from its social environment (Lazonick 2013).
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Ruphy (2019) gives an epistemological discussion on this.
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It can be done, for example, when budgets are allocated to different research fields or approaches. Who makes the decision is another question that is considered by Ruphy (2019).
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It is worth noting here that globalization has not only expanded our knowledge, but also our concern for others, including those who are geographically or temporally far away. Networks currently play a key role, but they must reject their traditional roles. Some still want them to educate the public in order to encourage social acceptance of new technologies, or to simply measure the “impacts” of choices already made. They must instead develop with SSH research in order to inform public debate, nourish democratic discussion and analyze innovations that emerge from society. For example, the solutions found by people who have to monitor their electricity consumption in order to save money are of interest for current research on energy insecurity. This has nothing to do with behavior changes, but rather with immanent social innovation.
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In what follows, we put aside the epistemological discussion, which is well developed by Ruphy (2019), to focus on the political dimension.
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Lechevalier, S., Laugier, S. (2019). Innovation Beyond Technology—Introduction. In: Lechevalier, S. (eds) Innovation Beyond Technology. Creative Economy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9053-1_1
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