Innovation in Socio-Cultural Context

Frane Adam, Hans Westlund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415636223
• eBook ISBN: 9781136198908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Innovation - the process of obtaining, understanding, applying, transforming, managing and transferring knowledge - is a result of human collaboration, but it has become an increasingly complex process, with a growing number of interacting parties involved. Lack of innovation is not necessarily caused by lack of technology or lack of will to innovate, but often by social and cultural forces that jeopardize the cognitive processes and prevent potential innovation. This book focuses on the rule of social capital in the process of innovation: the social networks and the norms; values and attitudes (such as trust) of the actors; social capital as both bonding and bridging links between actors; and social capital as a feature at all spatial levels, from the single inventor to the transnational corporation. Contributors from a wide variety of countries and disciplines explore the cultural framework of innovation through empirics, case studies and examination of conceptual and methodological dilemmas.

Part I

The Cultural and Cognitive Framework of Innovation

1 Culture and Cognition

The Foundations of Innovation in Modern Societies¹

Marian Adolf, Jason L. Mast, and Nico Stehr

In The Wall Street Journal (Asia; December 10–12, 2010, 12), a deputy principal of the Beijing University High School comments on the recent results of Shanghai’s 15-year-olds who topped the global league tables in the PISA tests and notes perhaps the obvious, namely, that “Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardizing tests.” However, he adds, “for that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy.” Indeed, knowledge-intensive economic systems represent a new economic epoch. The same comment concludes on a cautionary note: China “has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy?” In this chapter, we will try to answer the question of what competencies and skills are important for innovativeness in a knowledge-based economy. Obviously, we agree, success at responding to clues of standardized testing cannot be the answer.

Although we are stressing the importance of discontinuities, it is not our contention that the sum of the discontinuities constitutes a historically new economic system. According to Werner Sombart (1916–1917, 2122) writing in the tradition of the historical school—every economic system has a form of organization, a technique, and a mental attitude. Of these attributes of the economic system, the unique set of attitudes toward economic life at different times, for example the principles of acquisition, of competition, and of economic rationality of the capitalist system, are among the most important. We are not proposing that the knowledge-intensive economy has such a unique leading idea³, a leading idea that would allow one to readily identify the historically distinctive mental trait of the knowledge-based economic⁴. Nor can it be said that knowledge-based economic systems have a unique form of organization or technique. Some observers are convinced that modern information and communication technologies represent a distinctive technique typical for knowledge-intensive economies. But as we maintain, the operative economic function of information and communication technologies often tends to be overstated. There is considerable continuity in “economic evolution.” Last but not least it is the continuity of the necessity of capital to reproduce itself.

But with Sombart (as well as Max Weber), we are stressing that culture and cognition generally make a considerable difference in economic affairs. The importance of culture and cognition grows as we move toward a knowledge-intensive economic system⁵. This observation about the significance of culture and cognition has another social theoretical merit in that it keeps us from the familiar attempt to conceive of modern society in economic terms only, referring, for example, to the relentless economization of society.

We are claiming that certain cognitive competencies not only tend to be more common in knowledge-based economies but operate as a mental prerequisite for creativity, innovation, innovative processes, and the comparative advantage of nations. We are asking what specific orientations, competencies, and characteristics must a person or collectivity have in order to be innovative or take innovative ideas from his or her environment on board, taking for granted that institutions provide important conditions for the possibility of innovations (cf. Modaschl, 2010, 1).

By stressing certain cognitive competencies as the foundation for innovation, we are not merely reiterating the much more common observation about the growing importance of a highly educated or skilled labor force in modern economies. In fact, we are offering a rival hypothesis, namely, that the cognitive capacities enhancing innovativeness—although associated with formal education and years of education—are not only among the foundations for innovation as we see it but also among the foundations for educational achievement (cf. Schieman and Plickert, 2008, 176). We see our contribution to the innovation literature as a contribution to the sociology of innovation in distinction to the now dominant economic theory of innovation (cf. Godin, 2010). We diverge from the mainstream economic literature, for example, from Giovanni Dosi (1984, 88–89) who, in the field of industrial innovation, sums up the conditions for the possibility of technological innovation in market economies as best described and served by the dual conditions of technological opportunity and the private appropriability of the benefits of the innovative activities. The commitment of private firms to innovation (in contrast to the capability to be innovative) is, of course, undeniably linked to their ability to temporarily appropriate the marginal additions to new knowledge, and therefore the economic advantages that may accrue from the control over novel knowledge (also Geroski, 1995). We are stressing that in addition to these necessary technical, legal, and economic factors, cultural and cognitive prerequisites are the sufficient condition for the possibility of invention and innovation.

After all, as more and more innovation studies have shown⁶, the realisation of knowledge, or its translation into technical artefacts, is an extremely complex intellectual and organisational process that relies on sources of knowledge and on “action networks” both “internal” and “external” (for example, on “public science”; see Gibbons and Johnston, 1974) to firms or organizations⁷.

The social process of innovation does not follow consistent patterns. In the case of innovation routes, we are dealing with a rather fragile social process, riddled with disappointment, that does not lend itself to exact planning and prognostication (cf. Latour, 1993; Gibbons et al., 1994). As Richard John (1998, 205) shows, in a study of the evolution of American communications, “the most fundamental technical breakthroughs—electric signaling in the 1840s, voice transmission in the 1870s—emerged in highly unusual contexts that provide few obvious lessons for students of innovation today. Equally idiosyncratic was the conceptual advance that hastened the creation of the modern postal system in the years immediately following the adoption of the federal Constitution.”

We are going to advance our argument about the importance of culture and cognition for innovation in a number of steps. First, we will address the notion of innovation and argue that we do not have a general theory of innovation, last but not least because the concept of innovation is, as it were, all encompassing. We shall also make the point that the distinction between invention and innovation proposed by Joseph Schumpeter ([1911] 1934) in his 1911 seminal volume The Theory of Economic Development is rather difficult to sustain in a consistent manner. Second, in light of the broad notion of innovation as, in the end, of any kind of change, we will focus on the idea that innovation (invention) represents a process of cognitive displacement. Third, we offer some additional observations about the culture of inventions and innovation in societies and in economic systems that are fragile, uncertain, tenuous, and face wicked problems that are most difficult to solve—if they are even capable of being solved. Fourth, for our purposes, we frame innovation as a process of a form of cognitive displacement, whereby existing metaphorical frameworks are used to explain new phenomena in a process that changes both the metaphor’s and the new phenomenon’s compositions. Fifth, we suggest that the phenomenon knowledgeability, or bundle of social and cognitive competencies, emerges as the main prerequisite for the potential of innovative thinking. We conclude by examining the most important social competencies that structure the possibilities for invention and innovation.

INNOVATION

Few words in any language are as frequently employed as is innovation. Perhaps innovation, on this stage, can compete with democracy and knowledge. All three terms are difficult to define. Nor are there many words that consistently meet with such partiality and approval as innovation. Innovation carries strong normative connotations. If I put it more formally, the term innovation typically performs the speech-act of commending what it tries to describe (cf. Sartori, 1968; Broman, 2002, 5).

It is therefore difficult to separate normative from analytical elements in the case of the concept of innovation. Although the most common conception of innovation refers to the successful implementation of a novel idea, it is complicated (cf. Beckenbach and Daskalakis, 2010), perhaps impossible, to separate the genesis of a new idea (invention) from its practical realization (innovation). Moreover, and as Steve Woolgar (1998, 442) has emphasized, whether or not “ideas count as new, necessarily depends on the social networks involved.” A novel idea is not self-validating but has to be recognized as such by other social actors. At the same time, there are few other social phenomena that are generally more significant for modern societies than innovation, knowledge, and democracy. Even political regimes that are authoritarian systems prefer to claim that they constitute innovative societies and have innovative economies.

In one of its most recent publications, the European Commission (2010, 13) offers the following definition of innovation: “whether the innovation is a product, process, marketing method or organizational method it must be new (or significantly improved) to the firm.” This definition therefore encompasses not only changes that are entirely novel, but also those that are adopted from outside. The Commission with slight understatement, perhaps even irony, adds: “Our capacity to measure and understand the process in practice still needs work.”

It is poignant that the idea of innovation plays such a central role in much of our contemporary political discussion about the economy, the wealth of nations, competitive advantages of societies, but that we appear to be unable to arrest and fence in the notion of innovation itself. The notion of innovation in the sense of novelty is also contained in such concepts as social change, development, evolution, mutation, creation, growth, imitation, invention, modernization, revolution, progress, discovery, and so on. In other words, there cannot possibly be a general theory of innovation since this would amount to a theory of life itself. The concept of innovation refers to processes, namely, change or novelty that is as least as universal as its opposite, namely, routine or habitual conduct. Innovations as such can hardly be predicted: “Genuinely new ideas come out of the blue” (Vromen, 2001, 199).

Hence if one desires to talk sensibly about innovation (invention), one must proceed with a relational concept of innovation⁸. For example, if one wants to account for technical innovations one does not need a theory of technology since technology only evolves in the context of society and not by itself. However, what would be required is a socio-economic theory of technical innovation. Such a theory would refer to a combination of factors such as the creativity of social action, economic incentives—as we mentioned earlier—and institutional conditions (or, on a smaller scale, social or action networks) that enhance technical innovativeness (cf. Moldaschl, 2010, 14).

In the case of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of social change within firms, the yeast that propels change within this set of complex factors is the creative entrepreneur. Our relational concept of innovation concentrates on those features of the subject or the collectivity that enable innovation. Subjects of course are embedded within a specific social context that either validates a displacement as new or resists such a declaration about its own social network.

CULTURE AND COGNITION: STRUCTURES, TOOLS, PERFORMATIVES, AND METAPHORS

In normative cultural terms, inventors and innovators are cast as geniuses, as social misfits, as loners, and often as psychologically tormented, as social actors tinkering in an unsettled cognitive state that becomes the wellspring for innovative ideas⁹. These cultural frameworks indicate the intangibility of the processes that create and facilitate inventive and innovative thoughts. If they are the product of geniuses, after all, then they are in many ways superhuman, of near-otherworldly origins; if innovators are simply born that way, then they are inexplicable and beyond the grasp of scientific investigation. Innovative ideas just happen to brilliant people, the framework suggests. We must conclude that on this fundamental point the very cultural categories that we bring to bear to understand invention and innovation are precisely part of the cognitive conditions that inhibit innovative and inventive thought, because the normative cultural understandings define innovative thought as indefinable, or as “ah-ha” moments that happen to brilliant people. But for our sake, these cultural forms of understanding make our question even more pressing and interesting: can we shine a light on the conditions that foster and encourage innovative thinking?

The issue of the potential for creative thought lies at the center of cultural-theoretical debate. Culture is theorized as representing a “tool kit,” or set of interpretive frameworks that social actors can choose selectively to solve problems and make sense of things during “unsettled cultural periods” (Swidler, 1986, 280), on the one hand, but also as a deep system of structuring symbol systems, a structure that we are born into, with very little capacity to reflect back on (Saussure, 1983 [1916]), on the other. In t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Introduction The Meaning and Importance of Socio-Cultural Context for Innovation Performance
• The Cultural and Cognitive Framework of Innovation
• Innovation and Social Capital A Reconsideration of Conceptual and Methodological Dilemmas
• Case Studies
• Discussion and Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Index