Innovation may be inevitable but the form it takes is not- reject the affirmatives quantitative approach to race for the most innovations in favor of making innovation better

(Alf, Innovation@Odense, The Future(s) of Innovation In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

Any story about innovation is, at heart, a story about the future of innovation. This as the story of how innovation becomes always involves a forward push, an opening up to the novel, the new, the never-before-seen. Innovation is future-directed activity, focused on making the future real today, if by ever so little. Innovation, in whatever way we try to do it, is an attempt to open up today to the future, if by ever so little. At the same time, the future of anything, including innovation, is unknowable. Had this book been written in the 1980s, it is exceedingly unlikely that it would have predicted the many ways in which the internet affected things such as business model innovation, social innovation, or open innovation. The step from networking technologies to what the internet became would simply have been too enormous to contemplate. Thus, any attempt to write about the future of innovation is bound to fail and to be an exercise in futility. That said, if this book has debated what innovation is right now—for and against, from different perspectives—it would seem a dereliction of duty not to at least attempt a comment on what innovation might become. For even though some of the chapters here have been quite critical of innovation (not least my own previous chapter on image and ideology in the innovation industry—see Rehn, Chap. 5 in this volume), I believe even the more critical commentators (see, e.g., Godin 2015; Godin and Vinck 2017) would agree that we will need innovation in the future. In fact, as we look to how the future seems more and more likely to be defined by a number of “wicked problems” (Rittel and Webber 1973), it becomes clear that there will be a more and more pronounced need for new technologies, new solutions, and new ways of working. This, however, doesn’t mean that innovation won’t be forced to change, even in painful ways. Looking to wicked problems such as the ecological crisis, a phenomenon like innovation looks very much like a double-edged sword. On the one hand, innovation has wreaked havoc during the consumption-driven era of late capitalism (cf. Jameson 1991). We have created more and more ways to entertain ourselves, and in so doing also created mountains of waste, and wasted mountains of energy. Bitcoin and other innovations in the field of crypto-currency have been interest ing in the way they open up for new ways of understanding the economy, yet at the same time it has been estimated that bitcoin alone uses as much energy as Argentina (with its 45 million inhabitants) and that it thus generates emissions on about the same levels as Greece. Innovative e-commerce firms, in conjunction with advances in manufacturing, have ensured that an astounding amount of products are available to buy for consumers globally, with all of the attendant waste and logistics externali ties. In a very real way, innovation created the problem it is now asked to solve, and no one knows where the flywheel stops. On the other, we can view the current state of the world as a fait accompli and have little choice but to trust in the capacity of innovation to bring forth novel ways of both keeping the world going and at the same time lessen the impact of contemporary capitalism. Either we start consuming far less, aiming for the politically very challenging project of global degrowth, or we innovate our way(s) out of the problem. Even in the latter case, it would seem that more and more of our innovation engagements will need to take into account something greater than innovation for the sake of innovation. Instead, many commentators (see, e.g., Suchek et al. 2021) have noted that one of the core issues for innovation now is how to engage with issues such as the circular economy, and in general addressing the issue of over-exploitation of global raw materials and other resources. Whereas innovators as recently as a decade or so ago could go about creating the new new thing with casual abandon regarding any other issue of sustain ability than whether raw materials could be had at a price point where the innovation could be sold at a profit in the market, today innovation is already a different ball-game. Issues such as repairability, recyclability, design for disassembly, material re-use, and sustainable production sys tems are no longer just an issue for sustainability experts and environ mental engineers, they need to be heeded by anyone whose innovation has a material form, and most of those whose do not. The innovation calculation has changed, and while we certainly need to keep innovating, the task may well become one of not innovating more, but rather innovating better.