The 1AC relies on the deficit model of innovation- every problem is framed as a lack of innovation, making innovation an imperative. This obstructs potential alternatives framings- we need innovation politics not innovation policy

(Sebastian M. Pfotenhauer, Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) and TUM School of Management, , Joakim Juhlb Technical University Munich, Germany bDepartment of Planning and Development, Aalborg University, Denmark , Erik AardencDepartment of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna, Austria Challenging the “deficit model” of innovation: Framing policy issues under the innovation imperative , Research Policy, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2018.10.015)

Innovation has become a leitmotif of policy making and institutional design (Pfotenhauer & Jasanoff 2017a). The European Commission instructively labeled the continent an “Innovation Union,” setting the tone for European self-imagination in the new millennium (EC, 2011). Across the globe, ministries and agencies of innovation are being created or carved out of existing government portfolios, churning out countless strategies and reports. Universities – in the past, often portrayed as ivory towers of open-ended tinkering with ideas – have found their 21st-century mission primarily as “innovation engines” (Mansfield and Lee, 1996; Mowery, 2004; Thorp and Goldstein, 2010; Pfotenhauer, forthcoming) with significant consequences for their internal organization, funding models and assessment. Geeks and tech entrepreneurs have moved out of the countercultural margins of society and into the public and economic mainstream, frequently serving as role models for today’s teenage generation. Fittingly, the topic of this special issue in Research Policy highlights the transformative power of innovation. With growing ubiquity, the call for innovation is increasingly taking the form of an “innovation imperative” across countries and sectors. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development notes in its “Innovation Strategy” that “while no single policy instrument holds all the answers, innovation is the key ingredient of any effort to improve people’s quality of life. It is […] essential for addressing some of society’s most pressing issues, such as climate change, health and poverty” (OECD, 2010). The European Commission has diagnosed an “Innovation Emergency [whereby] Europe is spending 0.8% of GDP less than the US and 1.5% less than Japan every year on Research & Development (R&D). Thousands of our best researchers and innovators have moved to countries where conditions are more favourable” (EC, 2016). In its 2011 Strategy for American Innovation, the Obama White House likewise proclaimed that “America’s future economic growth and international competitiveness depend on our capacity to innovate. […] To win the future, we must out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world” (The White House, 2011). This “innovation imperative” has changed something about the way we bring the concept of innovation to bear in public policy: formerly principally an analytic category used to explain technological change and economic growth, innovation has become a framing device – a kind of diagnostic lens – through which we tend to frame policy problems as problems of innovation. The call for more innovation has become a panacea policy response that promises to solve problems almost independently of their specifics (Pfotenhauer and Jasanoff, 2017a). Complex social challenges that, a decade ago, might have been framed differently – from low literacy rates to sluggish economic growth, growing inequality, obesity, traffic congestion, environmental degradation, all the way to climate change – now all demand innovation centered solutions. Conversely, this logic suggests that we are unable to address our grand challenges or ensure economic competitiveness because our societies, institutions, scientific activities or individual predispositions are not sufficiently geared toward innovation. The innovation imperative is further exacerbated by perceived international competition pressure and the threat of falling behind, as illustrated by the above quotes from the European Commission and the White House Strategy. In this paper, we analyze this emerging pattern whereby policy problems are framed as problems of innovation and where a lack of innovation is routinely invoked as the main obstacle to social progress. We call this pattern the “deficit model of innovation” (DMI) because of salient parallels to the so-called deficit model of public understanding of science (PUS), which we will discuss below. Under this deficit model, innovation is increasingly wielded as a political framing device that constructs parts of society and various social institutions as insufficient and in need of an innovation agenda.1 We argue that closer attention to this deficit framing is needed because it is an essential part of how innovation transforms societies in the 21st century: not only through new technological possibilities or economic growth, but also by structuring policy options and acting as a source of legitimacy with profound consequences for how we envisage and justify social change. Diagnosing innovation deficits, we argue, is a political act that prevents alternative (and perhaps more appropriate) policy framings. Harnessing the transformative power of innovation and directing it toward the public good will thus require an explicit shift from “innovation policy” to “innovation politics,” supported by new forms for democratic deliberation. This puts our paper in direct conversation with what Schot and Steinmueller (2016) call an emergent “Frame 3” for innovation policy aimed at directed “transformative change.” In our opinion, the development of better policy instruments cannot proceed disconnected from thorough political discussions about the means and ends of innovation policy – i.e. which futures we collectively want, and how we want to get there. Here, innovation policy has much to learn from previous science policy debates around PUS, as discussed below. Our paper thus adds to the growing body of research that emphasizes the need for reflexive and critical engagement with innovation, as witnessed by the emergence of the responsible innovation paradigm (Stilgoe et al., 2013; von Schomberg, 2013) and growing calls for a more reflexive stance toward innovation systems approaches (Kuhlmann et al., 2012). In the following, we first develop an analytic framework for how the deficit logic operates, drawing on scholarship on PUS. We then apply the framework to three case studies to demonstrate its analytic purchase in analyzing recent innovation strategies in Luxembourg, Singapore, and Denmark. We conclude by outlining the implications of our research agenda for innovation scholarship and public policy.