Critical Studies of Innovation
Alternative Approaches to the Pro-Innovation Bias

Different theories, models and narratives of innovation compete for both legitimacy and authority. However, despite the variations, they all offer a consistent pro-innovation bias, dismissing resistance as irrational, and overlooking the value of non-users and collateral impacts. This book asks, what has been left out? It offers a reflexive view and invites researchers to consider new avenues of research, through a critique of current representations of innovation.

The chapters provide a different viewpoint on innovation by exploring what has been omitted from traditional innovation studies. The book examines imitation, non-innovative roles, resistance to innovation, slow innovation, the rationale of non-users, failure, withdrawal, collateral impacts and alternative models. Calling for new definitions and frameworks, the editors have created a critical program for innovation studies with new avenues for future research.

Offering state-of-the-art discussion of theories, models, narratives and ideologies of innovation and alternative approaches, this book will be an essential resource for scholars in technology and innovation, management, engineering, political and social sciences. It will also appeal to policy-makers in the science and technology sector.

Innovation: From the Forbidden to a Cliché

Part I - Problematic frameworks and narratives of innovation
. 1. Why is Imitation not Innovation?
. 2. “Innovation fads” as an alternative research topic to pro-innovation bias. The examples of Jugaad and reverse innovation
. 3. ‘Best practices’ as mimesis? Innovation policies in peripheral countries
. 4. Innovation and the political state: Beyond the myth of technology and markets

Part II - What is left with the pro-innovation bias
. 5. Moving towards innovation through withdrawal: the neglect of destruction
. 6. Comparing two cases of outlaw innovation: file sharing and legal highs
. 7. Unattended consequences of innovation

Part III - Reactions to innovation
. 8. Resistance as a latent factor of innovation
. 9. Socio-technical dynamics of counter-hegemony and resistance
. 10. “No” and “slow” innovation strategies as a response to increased innovation speed

Part IV - Alternatives frameworks
. 11. Learning thanks to innovation failure
. 12. The economic rationality of NOvative behavior
. 13. Regulatory enforcement as sociotechnical systems maintenance
. 14. A discourse analysis of innovation in academic management literature
. 15. Physics or biology as models for the study of innovation

Conclusion: Toward Critical Studies of Innovation
Index

Benoît Godin, Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS), Canada and Dominique Vinck, Université de Lausanne, Switzerland