Innovation Research in Technology and Engineering Management

A Philosophical Approach

Marc J. de Vries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000389289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: R&D
• Index: Business

Philosophy may not seem to be an obvious source to discover methods for successful product innovation management. However, this book shows that systematic reflection on the nature of product innovation management, supported by insights from the philosophy of technology, can illuminate the innovation process in technology and engineering.

Presenting methodological guidelines and philosophical reflections, this book guides readers through each phase of product innovation. At each step, ideas from the philosophy of technology are translated into practical guidelines for managing these processes. The book works through the philosophical perspectives on innovation, methods in innovation design and research, and the value and ethical implications of innovation.

Bridging the gap between philosophical context and practical methodologies, this book will be highly valuable for postgraduate students and academics researching and teaching innovation and philosophy of technology.

1 Introduction

“When he who hears does not know what he who speaks means, and when he who speaks does not know what he himself means – that is philosophy”. This quote from Voltaire, the famous 18th-century French philosopher, does not exactly sound as an invitation to start looking in the direction of philosophy for finding guidelines in product innovation management. Here are some more examples of what of course should be read as self-mockery by philosophers. William James, American pragmatist philosopher, says: “There is only one thing that a philosopher can be relied on to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers”. Here comes Montaigne, 16th-century French philosopher: “Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end”. Finally Jonathan Swift, who can be considered to be a (political) philosopher even though we mostly see him as an essayist, says: “The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora’s box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom”.

All these quotes have been taken from the first pages of a book that aims to introduce philosophy to a wide audience (“Philosophy for Dummies”, by Tom Morris; Morris 1999). Evidently, Morris found them useful to whet the reader’s appetite for studying philosophy. And of course, the humor in them helps to change our image of philosophers as if they are so abstract in orientation that they cannot have a good sense of humor. Also, they can be quite involved in practical matters such as politics and technology. As Allyn Fives argues, philosophers can have a unique contribution to public debates (Fives, 2016). In this book on technology and engineering, it will be argued that philosophy also can be a rich source of inspiration to support product innovation management and research to support that.

‘Philosophy’ is a word that is used in different ways. Often it means something like ‘ideas’ or ‘beliefs’. “My philosophy about this is that . . .” is something we regularly hear or read. In that meaning it does not have much authority, depending of course on who says or writes it. After all, my ideas can be based on flawed assumptions or being ill-informed. Philosophy, however, is more than just ideas I may hold about something. Philosophy in the academic sense is a discipline focused on systematic and argued reflection on reality. It deals with questions such as what is the nature of reality? What kind of things can be said to ‘exist’ in reality and in what ways can things exist? What kind of knowledge can we have about reality? How can we think about good and evil in reality? What kind of values can we pursue in reality? In what ways can we act in reality? These different questions have led to different subdisciplines of philosophy (metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, ethics, axiology, methodology). All of these can have a value for product innovation management as will be shown in the following chapters. After all, in developing technology, we want to use knowledge, do things in a certain way, and take into account what people will consider to be morally OK or not. We will have to think about the values that customers will look for, and reflections on the nature of artefacts in general may help us recognize what aspects need to be taken into account when designing and making them.

One of the most important things philosophy can do is to help in stating the relevant questions, perhaps even more so than providing the answers. Numerous innovations have failed simply because people did not ask relevant questions but made assumptions without questioning them. We assume that customers know what they want, so we ask them what they want and we get an answer from them. Later, to our surprise, they do not respond positively to the product that we developed for them entirely according to the answers they gave us. The precious lesson we learn is that we incorrectly assumed that they would be able to state their requirements in a phase in which there was no tangible or visible product yet. Having philosophical reflections in determining a product strategy can bring such questions to the foreground and prevent naïve decisions.

In this book we will start with some fundamental issues related to the nature of the reality in which products and strategies are developed and used. In Chapter 2, the notion of ‘worldviews’ will be used to investigate what type of fundamental questions can be raised. There is no reason to shy away from this notion, as it is nothing esoteric by nature (Vidal, 2008), although some worldview can be rather esoteric of course. Also, it need not be associated with religion immediately, although there are worldviews of course that are inspired by religions. What the notion will be used for is to show that some assumptions about reality may be more favorable for thinking about technological developments than others. That is not to suggest that one worldview is ‘correct’ and another is not; it just shows that one worldview is a more ‘natural’ starting point than another if one seeks for guidance in the development of new products and technologies.

In Chapter 3, the social context in which products and technologies are developed and implemented is discussed from a philosophical point of view. Reflections on the nature of this context lead to all sorts of conditions for a successful and responsible innovation. We will see how this social context contains a variety of actors that all have some kind of impact on the innovation, whether we like that or not. Some of these actors may have very outspoken ideas about what the world should look like, and an extreme way to express these is in the form of a utopia – an image of an ideal world. Utopias can either hamper or stimulate innovations, depending on how we treat them.

In the chapters following these more fundamental chapters, we will follow the process of innovations more or less step by step. A caveat here is that the order of the chapters does not necessarily suggest the temporal order in which steps are taken in innovations. Different innovations can take different paths. In fact, the idea of linearity in innovations is one of the ideas that will be challenged by philosophical reflections. Yet, the phases that will feature in the consecutive chapters will be part of innovations in some way or other.

Chapter 4 will focus on the variety of conditions that emerge from a reflection of reality of which its complexity will be taken into account. This will be spelled out in a range of aspects, each of which has its own regularity and purpose. Chapter 5 will continue with methodological considerations about the many schemes and flowcharts that one can find in handbooks for innovations. Chapter 6 focuses on the role of research in innovations. This research has a more-or-less scientific character, ‘more or less’ referring to the extent to which outcomes may or may not contribute to the development of scientific theories or just provide practical clues for the development of products and technologies. In the next chapter, Chapter 7, the way innovations can be and are assessed and valued is discussed. This chapter will particularly look at ethical considerations and the issue of sustainability.

An important disclaimer for this book is that it does not aim at prescribing how to do things, as happens in most books about management for product innovation. Rather, it aims at discussing the sort of assumption we make and the sort of questions that we need to pose in product innovation management. In that sense, this book complements the vast amount of literature that has a more cookbook type of nature. The philosophical orientation of this book does not make it less practical, though. It shows that innovating is not just a matter of following standard guidelines and carrying out standard procedures that need no further critical reflection. Philosophy can be seen as the ‘voice of the conscience’. It can be annoying to hear it express its concerns, but in the end, it mostly proves to be worthwhile to take it seriously. After all, prevention is better than cure.

References

1. Fives, A. (2016). The Role of Philosophy in Public Matters. In Fives, A. and Breen, K. (Eds.). Philosophy and Political Engagement. Reflection in the Public Sphere. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 7–27.
2. Morris, T. (1999). Philosophy for Dummies. New York, NY: Wiley Publishing, Inc.
3. Vidal, C. (2008). What Is a Worldview. In van Belle, H. and van der Veken, J. (Eds.). Nieuwheid denken. De wetenschappen en het creatieve aspect van de werkelijkheid (transl: Thinking Novelty. Sciences and the Creative Aspect of Reality). Leuven, Belgium: Acco, 1–12.

2 Philosophical perspectives on innovation

2.1 Worldviews as a philosophical tool

“Every story is informed by a worldview” – this is a quote from Brian Godawa, a famous Hollywood movie screenwriter. The very same holds for management strategies in technological innovation and research. What we plan and do is somehow influenced by our basic ideas about reality and this is exactly what a worldview (or in German: Weltanschauung) expresses. Therefore, it makes good sense to discuss worldviews in the context of research and innovation, if only to prevent what Per Galle called ‘insidious inconsistency’ in design due to a lack of coherence in our assumptions about reality (Galle 2008). Philosophers have a natural connection with worldviews as they aim at developing systematic reflections on the nature of reality and worldviews are expressions of basic ideas about that nature of reality. No wonder that many philosophers have been involved in defining and describing worldviews as a tool in philosophy. Well-known philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Dilthey, Husserl, Jaspers, and Heidegger are among those. There even exists a Worldview group of philosophers that is now called the Center Leo Apostel for Interdisciplinary Studies, named after one of its founders, a Belgian philosopher who worked at the Free University Brussels.

Apostel conceptualized a worldview in terms of six ‘big questions’ that correspond with six philosophical subdisciplines. Each particular worldview is a coherent set of concrete answers to these questions. According to Apostel, these basic questions are (Aerts et al., 1994):

1. What is? This ontological question leads to a model of reality as a whole.
2. Where does it all come from? This explanation question yields a model of the past.
3. Where are we going? This prediction question results in a model of the future.
4. What is good and what is evil? This axiological question is answered in a theory of values.
5. How should we act? This praxeological question leads to a theory of actions.
6. What is true and what is false? This epistemological question is answered in a theory of knowledge.

It would perhaps have been more appropriate to relate the fourth question with ethics as a subdiscipline of philosophy, as axiology is generally taken to be a wider term that also comprises aesthetical values. Therefore, in this chapter the term ‘ethics’ will be used here only for questions about good and evil and axiology for questions related to values in general, not just moral values.

For each of the six questions we will see how different answers lead to different perspectives on product development strategies and policies. We will start with a worldview that perhaps is one of the most elaborated ones in terms of the questions posed by Apostel and it is also the one that we will use in this book most of the times. It was developed by a Dutch philosopher, Herman Dooyeweerd. It has its roots in Christian faith, but it appeals to non-Christians as well. In the Netherlands, among other places, it has been taught to student engineers of very different backgrounds for many years and almost always evokes immediate recognition. Having seen this particular example of a worldview, we will compare it to other possible worldviews, not to give a ranking of ‘better’ or ‘less good’ worldviews, but to get an idea of their ‘fit’ with the needs of product development management.

2.2 The ontological question

The first question, ‘what is?’, according to Dooyeweerd, can be answered in a twofold way. In the first place, reality has different aspects, each of which has its own regularities (or ‘laws’, although this term is not unproblematic from a philosophical point of view). These aspects are ‘real’ in that they are not the product of our imagination but manifest themselves as we experience reality. This way of studying reality refers to what Dooyeweerd calls the ‘law-side’ of reality, because of the regularities than can be observed in each of the aspects. In Table 2.1 a list of 15 aspects is presented. There has been debate about this number; most philosophers do not see it as definite but rather as a number that on the one hand is large enough to provide insight into the richness and complexity of reality and on the other hand can still be overseen and even turned into practical tools for management (see Lems 2008 for an example in water management and Basden 2008 for an application on information systems). The table also provides an example of the meaning of each aspect for product development and an example of a regularity or ‘law’.

Table 2.1 Aspects of reality in Dooyeweerd’s ontology (Dooyeweerd 1955)

Name of aspect	Relevance for products (example)	Regularity (example)
Numerical (quantitative)	Number of parts	1 + 1 = 2
Spatial	Space taken by product	Sum of angles in triangle
Kinematic (motion)	Joint can move (or not)	Conservation of momentum
Physical	Material properties	Conservation of energy
Biotic (life)	Contact with living tissue	Survival of the fittest
Psychic (sensitive)	Customer perception of product	Psychological consumption law
Analytical (logical)	Reasoning about the product	Rules of logical inference
Formative (historical)	Product development process	Logic of steps in design
Symbolic (linguistic)	Name of the product	Grammar rules
Social	Impact of product on society	Politeness
Economic	Cost of product, price of product	Law of diminishing returns
Aesthetic	Appear...