world hunger affects nearly 2 billion people, that half of the world’s population does not have access to basic healthcare according to the WHO, etc.;
– the realization that the unbridled development of new technologies goes together with an incessant evolution of skills to use them, and leads to an accumulation of continuous learning or risk of being overwhelmed and staying on the side lines;
– the contribution of innovation to growth and productivity gains that is running out of steam.
All these reasons have led to a disenchantment with regard to innovation. In this chapter, however, we will show that such disenchantment is not separate from our way of thinking and of implementing innovation.
The epistemology of innovation is indeed a valuable “tool” for studying and questioning the production of knowledge about innovation and, through this, the relationship of models to action. However, one observation must be made at the outset. While there is an abundance of academic literature dedicated to innovation (mainly apologetic, by the way), only a few focus on the links between innovation and society or, to be more precise, question the meaning of innovation.
Among the latter, there is a lack of consensus on the meaning of innovation. Indeed, there are many different points of view in the literature. For example, for Benoit Godin, innovation is essentially a political concept. Beginning with a history of the concept of innovation, he points out that it should be recalled that the concept was historically constructed and “those who have challenged innovation for centuries – governments – are the same ones who have de-challenged it, making innovation an instrument of economic policy” (Godin 2014).
For the supporters of design thinking, innovation generates meaning for the user. Popularized in the early 2000s under the aegis of Tim Brown, design thinking is presented as a “methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos” (Brown 2008, p. 86). The meaning of innovation and its perception by users are then considered as the designer’s main challenges1 in order to avoid a dichotomy in meaning between the designer and the user, and to guarantee the success of the innovation. However, a question remains open, wondering if an innovation that makes sense for the user is necessarily advisable at a societal level?
For the promoters of responsible innovation, responsibility appears to be the aim of innovation. However, and as several authors have emphasized (Gossart 2018; Pavie 2018), this forgets that innovation considered responsible for its aim can have catastrophic ecological footprints or can be produced under deplorable working conditions. It also forgets that the concept of responsible innovation is not separate from the issues of the risk society; this, besdies the fact that it is a revival of the figure of the omniscient actor, leads to a lock-in related to the paradigm of possible control over an uncertain future (Genus and Iskandarova 2017).
Despite generating knowledge, these different points of view underrate the “political meaning of innovation” question, as the link between innovation issues and the city2. However, we will show that the circumspect view about innovation evoked above is intimately linked to the loss of the political meaning of innovation. We shall see that while this loss of meaning has led to a questioning of innovation, it has not only contributed to rehabilitating innovation but it has also opened the way to a renewed conception of innovation that acknowledges the fact that innovation must meet the inseparable objectives of creating value for the user and society. Because it rehabilitates the question of the political meaning of innovation, we will thus present the outlines of the Penser le Sens de l’Innovation (PSI) (Thinking about the Meaning of Innovation) approach (Chouteau et al. 2020). We will see, along the way, how this approach is situated in relation to the different points of view mentioned above and how the epistemology of innovation can highlight updated innovation practices, issues in sync with major contemporary challenges.
1.2. Conceptions of the meaning of innovation over time
The relationship between society and innovation is emblematic of the history of a tumultuous relationship.
Innovation was initially perceived negatively because, as Plato suggests, it calls into question the established order and leads “without anyone noticing, youth (…) to despise what is old and esteem what is new (…) it is the greatest evil that can befall any state” (Plato 2013, pp. 2679–2680)3. As Benoit Godin (2014) points out, this conception of innovation would last for centuries. Can we find a better illustration than the definition given in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie where innovation is defined as a disease “These kinds of innovation are always deformities in the political order” (Joncourt 1751, in Huyghe 2013)?
From the 16th century, however, innovation has been symbolic of a break with tradition, a break even more understandable because innovation is based on the idea of progress. From the end of the 16th century, Francis Bacon and René Descartes, for example, associated the progress of knowledge with that of technology and the progress of technology with the progressive improvement of living conditions for humankind. Indeed, technological progress is considered by René Descartes as the vector for the conception of a new “Garden of Eden” in which misery, illness and even death can be excluded, building on human genius (1966).
This vision of Progress, with a capital letter, we might say, culminated in the Age of Enlightenment, a century that could be considered as the moment of the victory of Progress against retrograde obscurantism. A century in which man would no longer endure the course of history but become the subject of history by taking God’s place in the order of creation and participating in the design of the world in which he lives. A century in which faith in the capacity of humankind to act through reason would prevail, to concretize moral and social ideals in the real world, which would lead to the development of Saint-Simonianism in France. Indeed, this post-revolutionary doctrine initiated by Saint Simon saw in the rise of industry “a true project for society, capable of allowing a policy favorable to the public interest and generating true social peace” (Ménissier 2016), leading him to affirm that the golden age of humanity was before us and not behind us.
History seems to agree with such a vision of things because, in France a century later, the Belle Epoque consecrated the advent of a period of prosperity sustained by the greatest wave of discoveries and innovations in history, a time when the sense of innovation continued to be seen through the prism of progress oriented by a political project: the increase in the happiness of humanity.
However, the 20th century marked a decisive turning point. At the beginning of the century, the belief in Progress collapsed and led, through the advent of the relationship between innovation and economic progress4, to a shift from a concept of innovation for society to that of innovation for business. The entry into the era of the consumer society opened up a process of “massification of the production of innovations” (Forest 2020). This process is not unrelated to market saturation, combined with exacerbated competition, which today condemns many companies to innovating simply to tread water. This observation may seem trivial, but it is not, as it helps us to understand that innovation, whatever its nature, has changed its status over time. In the majority of cases, it is no longer considered as a project at the service of society, but an end in itself, intended to anticipate the offers of potential or existing competitors; i.e. emphasizing the strategic meaning of innovation for the company and underrating the meaning of these innovations and the relationship we have with them. This observation is even more worrying as the shift from the meaning of innovation to that of a meaning of company-oriented innovation was combined, on the consumer side, with the idea that the increase in the consumption of innovations is connected to that of our well-being5, even though the correlation established between innovation and happiness is an illusion.
1.3. When innovation, like the phoenix, rises from the ashes
It is clear that, with the era of the consumer society, innovation has become dissociated from the idea of Progress and thus from a reflection on the meaning of society that these innovations help to create. This dissociation was even easier as the massification of the