Critical Philosophy of Innovation and the Innovator

Xavier Pavie

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781786301475
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119405122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The major innovations which have occurred between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century represent a fresh challenge to the responsibility of innovators. Innovators have disrupted, and continue to disrupt the world through the growth of technology, DNA sequencing, genetic engineering, the management of large databases, different forms of intrusion into our private lives, etc. It is up to them take full responsibility for their actions, and question what they are accomplishing, why they are accomplishing it, to what end and with what means. Such questionings are those found in a practice conducted by Ancient philosophers: spiritual exercises. These were internal or external discourses, enabling individuals to act, think, to know how to behave and how to master oneself. It is surely toward these practices innovators of today should turn in order to innovate with wisdom.

1
The Need to (Re)think Innovation

“It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.”

(Descartes, 1992, p. 57)

1.1. The innovation context: how far to innovate?

As a result of innovations, mainly new products and services, but also processes or new marketing methods, animal populations and species disappear. The massive development of technologies, products and consumer goods, both current and in the past, has a direct impact on the depletion of natural resources. There is undoubtedly a degradation of the atmosphere, soils and the oceans due to human activity and the constant search for economic growth. Increasing urbanization is constantly changing the balance of the biosphere. These challenges are global: acid rain, borderless radioactive pollution and the “7th continent” made of plastic drifting in the Pacific, outside national waters. These consequences are linked to the unpredictability of innovations that can be introduced to the market. When chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were introduced in the 1950s, nobody predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s we would discover that they were major greenhouse gases and destroyed the stratospheric ozone layer (Schmid 1976)¹.

“Science without conscience is the death of the soul,”² François Rabelais announced, with a particularly visionary spirit, in the 16th Century. Moreover, it does not stop at the consequences on the environment: electronics has invaded our daily lives with the communication objects on which we have become dependent; the “digitization of the world” becomes a considerable challenge; nanotechnologies are omnipresent in food, in clothing, in furniture and cars. However, this is only the beginning, given the future progress in the exploitation of the human body and its representations in terms of commonplace automatons.

However, new digital technologies and associated new means of communication are no strangers to democratic pressures, making it possible to publicize complex political situations and mobilize populations, in contexts of limited freedom of expression. Medical advances, supported by technology, are showered with praise by their beneficiaries.

Thus, the notion of innovation, like that of science, must be put into perspective with the Greek term deinon, which expresses both the terrible and the admirable, combining to express the power of opposites. This is the example of a man who has “resources, whose ingenious skill exceeds all hope, he advances sometimes towards evil and sometimes towards good,” says Sophocles in Antigone (Sophocles 1955, p. 86³). However, it is the individual-innovator and the individual alone who can make an innovation change from one side to the other, sometimes towards evil, sometimes towards good, and make this change either consciously or not. If there was a period when religion had such an influence on institutions that it restricted certain possibilities of progress, for example, in reproductive choice, this constraint has totally disappeared, if only from the scientists’ laboratory benches. Moreover, the latter have not always had the means to achieve their ambitions. It is only in the last few decades that there has been clear technical and technological acceleration, with the increase in genetic knowledge, the first modifications of DNA, the beginnings of cloning and the acceleration of NBIC convergence (nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science). The problem no longer seems to lie in moral acceptance or scientific capacity, it is instead the duty to act or not act with ethics and responsibility⁴.

This context necessarily raises questions about the future of humanity. In what form is the human individual advancing and with what uses, or exploitation, of their ecosystem? Are there nothing more than innovations with goals exclusive to one population or another, with a total lack of progress for humanity as a whole?

Progress is a meta-model of change, which deals with the general perspective of evolution, that of knowledge with hope in the future of humanity. What hopes do we have today in the progress we are witnessing? Are we looking, not only for innovations that are highly targeted from a technical, scientific and social point of view, but, essentially, considered in relation to the market? Thus, it is possible to say that innovation is, in a way, a daughter of progress, constantly seeking to meet the needs of individuals. It has made real products and services that were pure science fiction less than a century ago. This is the case of transhumanism, whose declared aim is to improve the human condition through life-enhancing techniques, such as eliminating ageing and increasing intellectual, physical or psychological capacities (Pavie 2018a, pp. 138–159). However, this is clearly oriented towards commercial markets. Is there still progress here, when it is restricted, exclusive, elitist and free from humanistic thinking?

1.2. The innovation discipline

1.2.1. From reality to usurpation: the three stages of innovation

Innovation is a dual-entry device that can be called world-innovation, on the one hand, and consequential-innovation, on the other. The first one was bricked up when the second one was blinded. It is, in a way, a duality that must be accepted, but that does not mean that we cannot contradict this immurement and blindness. These two aspects have developed over time via three distinct stages. Before returning to these aspects and stages in detail, it is not surprising that the meaning of the term “innovation” has also evolved. This evolution has continued through the ages. Indeed, the “origin” of innovation, it is said, was determined in the Middle Ages, and we find its Latin composition: in (inside) and novare (change), and thus its purpose: aiding survival. However, at that time, innovation emerged, more in the legal spheres, to mean the change of contract to a new debtor, than in the arts or sciences. Before the 20th Century, the notion of “new” was clearly preferred to “innovation” and “creation”, but especially “invention”. In the 16th Century, Nicolas Machiavelli used the term precisely in The Prince, then, a century later, in 1625, with Francis Bacon in Of Innovations. The pages devoted to innovation by these thinkers then evoke, in religion, people who are resistant to innovation, to change. It must be understood that, until the 18th Century, “innovation” was more of a pejorative term, an “innovator” was a person to be wary of. This was the case in political spheres, where change was negatively perceived, and in religious spheres, because of orthodoxy; innovation was considered heresy. The pejorative aspect was also felt in the 18th Century, when inventors began to earn money from their inventions. It was not until the end of the 19th Century that the first theory of innovation emerged with the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, a century in which he distinguished between static and dynamic societies. He was interested in explaining different social changes, whether they concern grammar, language, religion, law, constitution, economic regime, industry or the arts. However, while he spread the notion of innovation as a novelty, he did not explicitly define this idea (Tarde 2001).

We propose to review this change from a new perspective, more precisely, with two major dimensions: world-innovation and consequential-innovation, which help us to understand why innovation has become what it is.

1.2.1.1. World-innovation/consequential-innovation

1.2.1.1.1. World-innovation

Behind world-innovation is the human desire intrinsic to progress. Progress comes from Latin progressus (to march), from progredi (to march forward), from pro (forward), and gradi (to march). This “forward march” is an evolutionary process oriented towards an ideal, it is what advances and develops over time. The roots of innovation are those of progress, its source and, first and foremost, the progress and evolution of knowledge. There is a tenuous link in “classical” philosophy between understanding and progress. We only understand by progressing, we only progress by understanding. This explains the historical intertwining between philosophy and science. The astonishment that characterizes the origin of philosophy according to Aristotle (Pavie 2018a) has led philosophers to wonder about the arising phenomena. They began to understand and progress in knowing what surprised them. If the answers were scientific, they all stem from philosophical questions. Philosophers seek to understand, or advance their understandings and thus their knowledge. This explains why the first scientists, physicists and chemists were philosophers. We can mention the atomist theories of Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus, the alchemists of the Middle Ages or the 16th Century, such as Paracelsus⁵ or, more recently, chemists such as Berthelot, who belong as much to the field of science as to that of philosophy. They have never ceased to be intellectuals of progress. They have advanced both science and knowledge, articulating both discovery and thought. Philosophy is the daughter of progress and evolution, whether this progress is “natural”, scientific or intellectual.

World-innovation expresses the evolution that tends towards an ideal, whatever the field in which it is expressed: economy, sport, art or politics, and ultimately, only responds to its purpose, which is to change something or someone in order to solve a problem or survive. Its desire is to bring about these changes towards an ideal. There is a form of disinterest behind the notion of world-innovation, in what this term implies, the desire to change for a whole and not for a single community is identified, where innovation is understood not as a means but as an end and that end is generic. This is not to say that world-innovation is positioned outside the economic stakes, particularly – often necessary – questions of profit, but only with the desire to maintain a dynamic that makes it possible to preserve the survival, the resolution of the problem, the search for the ideal that was the origin of world-innovation. It is worth noting that the notion of “world” is necessarily understood as the place where action takes place. It is a world of immanence, a secular life, where implementation and action take place. This willingness to act by striving towards the ideal for the world here and now defines world-innovation.

If we consider that world-innovation is enclosed or silenced, it is because its forms and its original purpose no longer have a place. There is no longer any space for it to express itself, because innovation is now only understood for its consequences.

1.2.1.1.2. Consequential-innovation

Consequential-innovation can be seen as similar to world-innovation in that it also acts in response to a problem, a change from an external environment. However, it is almost its opposite, in that it does not care about the ideal and focuses only on its own success – all the more so if it is financially profitable. Moreover, it is not the result – like world-innovation – of a philosophical question, it is limited to the study of customer needs, market analyses and business plans. Innovation terminology is nowadays essentially understood as such: the search for success...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Need to (Re)think Innovation
• 2 The Non-standard Philosophy for Thinking Innovation
• 3 A Phenomenology of Innovation
• 4 Spiritual Exercises to (Re)think the Innovator
• Conclusion
• References
• Index of Names
• Index of Notions
• End User License Agreement