Raising the Sail of Innovation

The reality of today’s global challenges has paved the way for Responsible Innovation (RI), which aims to steer innovation processes towards societally desirable outcomes. Under the sway of ‘science with and for society’, the hypothesis is that innovation can only really respond to the needs and ambitions of society by including all its actors in the process.  However, frameworks and policies of RI mainly focus on regulating innovation processes (e.g. through applying ethical keys and integrating normative dimensions), while little thought is dedicated to what innovation itself means conceptually.

To this end, the contribution of this dissertation is twofold. First, through an extensive analysis of both the policy and academic discourse on RI, it exposes a techno-economic concept of innovation. Parallel to Martin Heidegger’s idea of ‘Enframing’, it argues that in the attempt to regulate a techno-economic concept of innovation, the RI discourse remains subject to its overall dominance. Second, it articulates a shift towards a political concept of innovation which genuinely serves the public good beyond mainstream economic incentive. Inspired by the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, it proposes a vision of RI which actualizes the human capacity for speech and action, inspires radical novelty, and empowers the public sphere.

As such, this book politicizes the RI discourse precisely in the way it was originally envisioned, that is, through conceptualizing innovation as a fundamentally political matter. In this view, politics is not merely an extension of RI but is itself the condition of RI; it is what enables innovation to genuinely serve the public good

Available for open access here.