This paper explores how inclusive and environmentally focused research and innovation policies challenge dominant models by reshaping directionality and governance for social transformation. It contributes to Critical and Transformative Innovation Studies by addressing key intertwined gaps: the role of agency, the political economy of policy instruments, the politics of continuity, and its territorial grounding. Analytically, it expands a Knowledge Systems approach, promoting a broader, symmetrical view of innovation that values diverse actors, policies, infrastructures, and knowledges. It challenges competitiveness-driven assumptions by exploring how alternative normative directions are negotiated over time. Through two case studies in Argentina—Yogurito (a probiotic yogurt to address malnutrition) and the Paraná River Aquarium (focused on biodiversity conservation)—the paper traces innovation journeys as a process where multiple actors vie to steer its course. Directionality is framed as both a political process of prioritization and decision making amid competing interests and its negotiated outcome, shaped by actors’ visions, knowledge, and policy preferences. The paper also proposes a framework to empirically trace and analyze these evolving pathways. It shows how innovation is steered, which orientations take precedence, and the limits and possibilities of STI as a development driver under enduring structural constraints.
In recent years, innovation policy has increasingly turned to creativity as a resource for economic revitalization, social cohesion and sustainability transitions. In urban redevelopment, creative districts blend innovation logics of a “creative class” and “transformative innovation” with experimental urban governance to address grand challenges and enable broader societal transformation. Building on critiques of the idea that innovation and creativity function as “magic bullets” in the contemporary economy (Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009) , we explore the limits of this transformative promise in this article. Our analysis is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork across four creative district projects in Munich, Germany, where normative visions of creativity and innovation are rendered legitimate and governable. Through the conceptual lens of regional innovation cultures (Pfotenhauer et al., 2023) , we examine how the creativity-innovation-nexus is locally stabilized and tamed through distinct cultivation mechanisms, summarized as curation, compliance, and consolidation, that reinscribe existing socio-political settlements and market-driven valuation logics of the common good. Paradoxically, Munich’s creative districts foster a form of conservative creative innovation that constrains the transformative potential of creative innovation by reproducing hegemonic power structures and marginalizing alternative visions of conviviality (Robra et al., 2023). We argue that creative districts—and similar initiatives—risk undermining their potential as open, experimental spaces for radical transformation when they prioritize innovation’s productive role over creativity’s more politically contested and disruptive capacities.
This article investigates how innovationism—the neoliberal paradigm framing technological innovation as a profit-driven imperative—structures the sociotechnical controversy surrounding Vantablack. Through an STS lens, we analyze how Surrey NanoSystems, Anish Kapoor, and Stuart Semple mobilize contradictory narratives that simultaneously critique and reproduce innovationist ideologies. While the material’s development as a nanotechnology-based "superblack" pigment exemplifies technological determinism (treating Vantablack’s emergence as an autonomous scientific breakthrough), its artistic appropriation reveals co-produced tensions between market logics and cultural production. The actors’ practices demonstrate innovationism’s paradoxes: Surrey NanoSystems oscillates between high-tech branding and low-end commercialization; Kapoor leverages exclusivity despite achieving similar aesthetic effects through conventional means; Semple’s democratizing rhetoric relies on the same novelty-seeking mechanisms he condemns. These contradictions emerge from a shared ideological framework that naturalizes innovation as both economically necessary and socially neutral, obscuring its role in reinforcing asymmetries of access and power. We argue that the Vantablack controversy crystallizes broader tensions in technoscientific governance, where innovationism mediates between art, technology, and politics. Rather than resolving these tensions, the case exposes how even competing positions remain constrained by market-centric epistemologies that privilege short-term profitability over collective benefit. The study advances critical perspectives on innovation by unpacking its material, discursive, and ideological dimensions in contested cultural domains.
The Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex played a significant role in establishing innovation studies as a field and in establishing innovation policy as a framework for governmental thinking. But the SPRU’s first book was not directly about innovation; it was “Thinking about the future: a critique of the Limits to Growth” (1973). The “Limits to Growth” (1972) had been an attempt by researchers at MIT, funded by the Club of Rome and the Volkswagen Foundation, to quantitatively falsify the idea of endless growth on a finite planet. The SPRU’s response—later reprinted with the title “Models of Doom” outside the UK—was one of many that framed “Limits” as overly pessimistic. This paper considers the impact of this work on the developing fields of innovation research and policy. It takes a critical ethnostatistics approach to the modelling practices deployed by these two very different groups of professional social scientists. It focuses on two methodological moves made by the SPRU researchers. First, this paper shows how the SPRU arguments established a fetish for data precision—a standard that the MIT team rejected, but one that carried on through the SPRU’s further work into innovation research and policy. Next, it discusses how the SPRU researchers (role)modelled mathematical faith in socio-technical change. This was more than a techno-optimist (or Promethean) stance. It established a norm of toxic positivity around questions of technology, innovation, and the environment. These two methodological moves—fetishizing data precision while asserting toxically positive Prometheanism—became cultural memes that carried forward from this debate into innovation policy, modelling, and statistical practices. In short, the pro-innovation econometrics developed for this debate by the SPRU researchers had a lasting impact on the epistemic culture of innovation studies.
In a world increasingly captivated by the allure of technology and rapid innovation, the II NOvation Forum, held in 4-6 September 2024 at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in Curitiba (Brazil), stands as a critical and inspiring milestone. Under the theme «Reimagining Innovation for the Public Good», students, practitioners, and scholars from across the globe gathered to question the prevailing narratives of innovation and to explore alternative futures grounded in social justice, sustainability, and collective well-being. Full programme of the II Forum here: https://sites.google.com/view/novationforum/home-en-us?authuser=0.
This article analyzes the transfer process of the transformative innovation policy (TIP) framework in Colombia and the translation process carried out by Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policy actors, emphasizing the implications of this process for governance. Using the Colombian Green Book 2030 case study and its regional implementation, the article examines how the TIP framework has been adopted by stakeholders and reinterpreted in peripheral contexts. A qualitative study with an interpretive approach was conducted based on 30 semi-structured interviews with individuals involved in the analyzed transfer process, as well as observations and document reviews. The findings suggest that institutional inertia has influenced the appropriation of the TIP framework in Colombia, leading to its association with prior social innovation experiences that align with some of the framework's characteristics. This includes participation and the inclusion of local actors. The framework was reinterpreted to address specific local issues through niche configurations rather than destabilizing socio-technical regimes. This frames transformative change within policy instruments designed under a bottom-up model. Nevertheless, the territorial level has emerged as a key space for TIP experimentation, offering opportunities to explore other STI applications oriented toward social concerns. The study concludes that transferring the transformative framework provides an opportunity to reconsider STI policy governance.
In recent decades, innovation has achieved an extraordinary position in political, economic and cultural discourse. It has come to be seen as a universal remedy—a panacea capable of addressing social, environmental, economic and political challenges while simultaneously driving growth and competitiveness. As highlighted in the call for this thematic issue and as critically framed by several authors already, this belief rests on a powerful modern narrative: a fable of progress driven by science and technology, a promise that the future will inevitably be better than the present because innovation will carry us there. Yet this fable has obscured the social, political and environmental consequences of innovation systems designed around market logics, competition and technological determinism. It has eclipsed alternative imaginaries of collective flourishing and dismissed deeper questions about who benefits from innovation, who bears its risks, and what other futures might become possible. In response, the field of Critical Studies of Innovation has emerged to interrogate these assumptions. Building on the foundational work of Godin, Vinck, Pfotenhauer and others, scholarship has exposed the ideological character of “innovationism” (Oliveira, 2011) —the belief that innovation is inherently good, that more is always better, and that societal problems are ultimately innovation deficits. The contributions gathered in this issue extend this critique, while also advancing conceptual and empirical foundations for alternative pathways. They address the contradictions of innovation regimes, expose the limits of ‘x-innovation’ (Gaglio et al., 2019) rebrandings, analyse the politics of governance and directionality, and foreground community-based, solidaristic and human-centred approaches that disrupt dominant models. This issue has been deliberately structured to move from historical–epistemic critique, to sectoral and institutional analysis, to territorial experimentation, and finally to conceptual and methodological tools for rethinking innovation. Each article contributes a distinct lens, yet together they build a coherent argument: that the current innovation paradigm—rooted in neoliberalism, technological determinism and a narrow economic rationality—is neither inevitable nor desirable, and that viable, situated alternatives already exist, albeit often marginalised or invisible.
The theoretical article is devoted to the human and social factors of innovations. This is due to the fact that innovation is an increasing and inevitable trend of our time, with deep impacts on society, on nature and on individuals. At the same time, innovations are related to the area of large economic risks and have quite pronounced contradictions, including in the psychological context. The article reveals the basics of studying the psychological context of innovation and the main risks associated with such a context, drawing attention to the need of developing conceptual approaches to better understand this phenomenon, as well as proper policy frameworks that address innovation under these emerging views. As a result, the author’s model for the analysis of risks and innovation resources is presented. The model includes three levels of analysis: the macro level (socio-cultural and institutional factors), the meso level (company level), and the micro level (a person as a subject, creator and/or consumer of innovations). This approach allows us not to make too sharp distinctions between the social, psychological and economic factors of innovation.
This paper theorises how inclusive grassroots innovation responds to socio-economic inequalities and facilitates efforts to overcome them, contingent on solidaristic relationships. As a mainstream policy concept, the term ‘innovation’ has become more narrowly defined as capital-intensive technological innovation, which has often worsened social inequalities. In response, ‘inclusive innovation’ has become an umbrella term encompassing diverse alternatives seeking to reduce or avoid social inequalities. These have arisen especially in the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE), based on democratic self-management and mutual aid; its enterprises depend on wider ecosystems of support groups. The SSE has some overlaps with Alternative Agri-Food Networks (AAFNs), which build greater social proximity between producers and consumers. Hence the overlap is here called the SSE-AAFNs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many SSE-AAFNs rapidly adapted to the disruptions through novel practices that could fulfil their members’ needs. SSE-AAFNs ecosystems played this creative role through three general parameters: inclusive grassroots innovation, agile adaptations, and a transformative resilience bouncing forwards. These parameters form a tripartite framework that helps to analyse case studies of SSE-AAFNs in Brazil and Turkey. In both cases, grassroots innovation helped to overcome social inequalities (of class, race, gender), in ways contingent on each initiative and its context. SSE-AAFNs have demanded and gained support measures from municipalities, along lines helping to build collective capacities rather than dependence. The tripartite analytical framework here has wider relevance to SSE ecosystems developing grassroots innovation which can overcome inequalities.
Philosopher of technology, Darryl Cressman, is an assistant professor at Maastricht University. Cressman’s work engages with a wide variety of disciplines and approaches, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), media theory, the history and philosophy of science, innovation studies, and critical theory. He is the editor of The Necessity of Critique: Andrew Feenberg & the Philosophy of Technology (2022), a collection which brings together diverse perspectives from various authors to focus on Feenberg’s critique of technology. In this interview, Cressman provides insights into his philosophical roots, approach, and methodology.
The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most (2020), by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell, presents a blistering critique of the contemporary ideology of innovation, exposing what the authors call «innovation-speak» – a hegemonic discourse that glorifies disruptive change and marginalises the essential work of maintenance. The Innovation Delusion, by Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell, published not many years ago (2020), is among the scholar books one must read, especially for younger generations and policymakers around the world. Many years ago, Steven Shapin (1989) unearthed the role of the technician in modern science. Innovation Delusion does the same for hidden activities in innovation — i.e., activities related to technology and engineering. Maintenance, upkeep and care is the motto behind Vinsel and Russell’s book.
In a world increasingly captivated by the allure of technology and rapid innovation, the II NOvation Forum, held at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in September 2024 (4-6th) stands as a critical and inspiring milestone. Under the theme «Reimagining Innovation for the Public Good», students, practitioners, and scholars from across the globe gathered to question the prevailing narratives of innovation and to explore alternative futures grounded in social justice, sustainability, and collective well-being. Building on the foundations laid during the inaugural Forum, the second edition reaffirmed NOvation's mission: to establish an interdisciplinary community around the study of innovation, scholar-led community, a slow-science research endeavour that critically examines innovation as a deeply political phenomenon. It called for a shift beyond the mere deployment of emerging technologies, embracing the social, historical, and ethical dimensions of innovation practices. More fundamentally, it challenged the ideology of "innovation-speak" (according to Vinsel and Russell 2020 book, «The Innovation Delusion») that pervades contemporary policy and academic discourse, inviting us to rethink who innovation serves and how it can truly contribute to the public good.
This paper explores how inclusive and environmentally focused research and innovation policies challenge dominant models by reshaping directionality and governance for social transformation. It contributes to Critical and Transformative Innovation Studies by addressing key intertwined gaps: the role of agency, the political economy of policy instruments, the politics of continuity, and its territorial grounding. Analytically, it expands a Knowledge Systems approach, promoting a broader, symmetrical view of innovation that values diverse actors, policies, infrastructures, and knowledges. It challenges competitiveness-driven assumptions by exploring how alternative normative directions are negotiated over time. Through two case studies in Argentina—Yogurito (a probiotic yogurt to address malnutrition) and the Paraná River Aquarium (focused on biodiversity conservation)—the paper traces innovation journeys as a process where multiple actors vie to steer its course. Directionality is framed as both a political process of prioritization and decision making amid competing interests and its negotiated outcome, shaped by actors’ visions, knowledge, and policy preferences. The paper also proposes a framework to empirically trace and analyze these evolving pathways. It shows how innovation is steered, which orientations take precedence, and the limits and possibilities of STI as a development driver under enduring structural constraints.
This paper theorises how inclusive grassroots innovation responds to socio-economic inequalities and facilitates efforts to overcome them, contingent on solidaristic relationships. As a mainstream policy concept, the term ‘innovation’ has become more narrowly defined as capital-intensive technological innovation, which has often worsened social inequalities. In response, ‘inclusive innovation’ has become an umbrella term encompassing diverse alternatives seeking to reduce or avoid social inequalities. These have arisen especially in the Social Solidarity Economy (SSE), based on democratic self-management and mutual aid; its enterprises depend on wider ecosystems of support groups. The SSE has some overlaps with Alternative Agri-Food Networks (AAFNs), which build greater social proximity between producers and consumers. Hence the overlap is here called the SSE-AAFNs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, many SSE-AAFNs rapidly adapted to the disruptions through novel practices that could fulfil their members’ needs. SSE-AAFNs ecosystems played this creative role through three general parameters: inclusive grassroots innovation, agile adaptations, and a transformative resilience bouncing forwards. These parameters form a tripartite framework that helps to analyse case studies of SSE-AAFNs in Brazil and Turkey. In both cases, grassroots innovation helped to overcome social inequalities (of class, race, gender), in ways contingent on each initiative and its context. SSE-AAFNs have demanded and gained support measures from municipalities, along lines helping to build collective capacities rather than dependence. The tripartite analytical framework here has wider relevance to SSE ecosystems developing grassroots innovation which can overcome inequalities.
Philosopher of technology, Darryl Cressman, is an assistant professor at Maastricht University. Cressman’s work engages with a wide variety of disciplines and approaches, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), media theory, the history and philosophy of science, innovation studies, and critical theory. He is the editor of The Necessity of Critique: Andrew Feenberg & the Philosophy of Technology (2022), a collection which brings together diverse perspectives from various authors to focus on Feenberg’s critique of technology. In this interview, Cressman provides insights into his philosophical roots, approach, and methodology.
This theoretical article is devoted to the human and social factors of innovations. This is due to the fact that innovation is an increasing and inevitable trend of our time, with deep impacts on society, on nature and on individuals. At the same time, innovations are related to the area of large economic risks and have quite pronounced contradictions, including in the psychological context. The article reveals the basics of studying the psychological context of innovation and the main risks associated with such a context, drawing attention to the need of developing conceptual approaches to better understand this phenomenon, as well as proper policy frameworks that address innovation under these emerging views. As a result, the author’s model for the analysis of risks and innovation resources is presented. The model includes three levels of analysis: the macro level (socio-cultural and institutional factors), the meso level (company level), and the micro level (a person as a subject, creator and/or consumer of innovations). This approach allows us not to make too sharp distinctions between the social, psychological and economic factors of innovation.
In recent years, innovation policy has increasingly turned to creativity as a resource for economic revitalization, social cohesion and sustainability transitions. In urban redevelopment, creative districts blend innovation logics of a “creative class” and “transformative innovation” with experimental urban governance to address grand challenges and enable broader societal transformation. Building on critiques of the idea that innovation and creativity function as “magic bullets” in the contemporary economy (Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009), we explore the limits of this transformative promise in this article. Our analysis is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork across four creative district projects in Munich, Germany, where normative visions of creativity and innovation are rendered legitimate and governable. Through the conceptual lens of regional innovation cultures (Pfotenhauer et al., 2023), we examine how the creativity-innovation-nexus is locally stabilized and tamed through distinct cultivation mechanisms, summarized as curation, compliance, and consolidation, that reinscribe existing socio-political settlements and market-driven valuation logics of the common good. Paradoxically, Munich’s creative districts foster a form of conservative creative innovation that constrains the transformative potential of creative innovation by reproducing hegemonic power structures and marginalizing alternative visions of conviviality (Robra et al., 2023). We argue that creative districts—and similar initiatives—risk undermining their potential as open, experimental spaces for radical transformation when they prioritize innovation’s productive role over creativity’s more politically contested and disruptive capacities.
In recent decades, innovation has achieved an extraordinary position in political, economic and cultural discourse. It has come to be seen as a universal remedy—a panacea capable of addressing social, environmental, economic and political challenges while simultaneously driving growth and competitiveness. As highlighted in the call for this thematic issue and as critically framed by several authors already, this belief rests on a powerful modern narrative: a fable of progress driven by science and technology, a promise that the future will inevitably be better than the present because innovation will carry us there. Yet this fable has obscured the social, political and environmental consequences of innovation systems designed around market logics, competition and technological determinism. It has eclipsed alternative imaginaries of collective flourishing and dismissed deeper questions about who benefits from innovation, who bears its risks, and what other futures might become possible. In response, the field of Critical Studies of Innovation has emerged to interrogate these assumptions. Building on the foundational work of Godin, Vinck, Pfotenhauer and others, scholarship has exposed the ideological character of “innovationism” (Oliveira, 2011) —the belief that innovation is inherently good, that more is always better, and that societal problems are ultimately innovation deficits. The contributions gathered in this issue extend this critique, while also advancing conceptual and empirical foundations for alternative pathways. They address the contradictions of innovation regimes, expose the limits of ‘x-innovation’ (Gaglio et al., 2019) rebrandings, analyse the politics of governance and directionality, and foreground community-based, solidaristic and human-centred approaches that disrupt dominant models. This issue has been deliberately structured to move from historical–epistemic critique, to sectoral and institutional analysis, to territorial experimentation, and finally to conceptual and methodological tools for rethinking innovation. Each article contributes a distinct lens, yet together they build a coherent argument: that the current innovation paradigm—rooted in neoliberalism, technological determinism and a narrow economic rationality—is neither inevitable nor desirable, and that viable, situated alternatives already exist, albeit often marginalised or invisible.
This article investigates how innovationism—the neoliberal paradigm framing technological innovation as a profit-driven imperative—structures the sociotechnical controversy surrounding Vantablack. Through an STS lens, we analyze how Surrey NanoSystems, Anish Kapoor, and Stuart Semple mobilize contradictory narratives that simultaneously critique and reproduce innovationist ideologies. While the material’s development as a nanotechnology-based "superblack" pigment exemplifies technological determinism (treating Vantablack’s emergence as an autonomous scientific breakthrough), its artistic appropriation reveals co-produced tensions between market logics and cultural production. The actors’ practices demonstrate innovationism’s paradoxes: Surrey NanoSystems oscillates between high-tech branding and low-end commercialization; Kapoor leverages exclusivity despite achieving similar aesthetic effects through conventional means; Semple’s democratizing rhetoric relies on the same novelty-seeking mechanisms he condemns. These contradictions emerge from a shared ideological framework that naturalizes innovation as both economically necessary and socially neutral, obscuring its role in reinforcing asymmetries of access and power. We argue that the Vantablack controversy crystallizes broader tensions in technoscientific governance, where innovationism mediates between art, technology, and politics. Rather than resolving these tensions, the case exposes how even competing positions remain constrained by market-centric epistemologies that privilege short-term profitability over collective benefit. The study advances critical perspectives on innovation by unpacking its material, discursive, and ideological dimensions in contested cultural domains.
This article analyzes the transfer process of the transformative innovation policy (TIP) framework in Colombia and the translation process carried out by Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policy actors, emphasizing the implications of this process for governance. Using the Colombian Green Book 2030 case study and its regional implementation, the article examines how the TIP framework has been adopted by stakeholders and reinterpreted in peripheral contexts. A qualitative study with an interpretive approach was conducted based on 30 semi-structured interviews with individuals involved in the analyzed transfer process, as well as observations and document reviews. The findings suggest that institutional inertia has influenced the appropriation of the TIP framework in Colombia, leading to its association with prior social innovation experiences that align with some of the framework's characteristics. This includes participation and the inclusion of local actors. The framework was reinterpreted to address specific local issues through niche configurations rather than destabilizing socio-technical regimes. This frames transformative change within policy instruments designed under a bottom-up model. Nevertheless, the territorial level has emerged as a key space for TIP experimentation, offering opportunities to explore other STI applications oriented toward social concerns. The study concludes that transferring the transformative framework provides an opportunity to reconsider STI policy governance.
