The Aff’s model of innovation is unsustainable and produces existential environmental catastrophe. We need to change our innovation thinking- slow is smooth and smooth is fast

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

As stated above, there are indications that innovation might accelerate in quite a massive way in the future. That said, we should also consider whether the future of innovation lies in slowing down and becoming more measured and considerate. We should by now all be aware that there are not one but several mega- or gigatrends in connection to this that will affect society as a whole and through this innovation. The first, and most obvious one, is global warming and the many attendant phenomena this has or will give rise to. If we are to survive, as a species and in something akin to the civilization we have established, radical change is needed. We have for too long lived with the unspoken assumption that any kind of innovation is good innovation, and this has led us to waste money, material resources, and cognitive power that could have been used elsewhere. As an example, consider the attempts by several startups and corporations to create a laundry-folding robot. In one case, that of the Laundroid (see Rehn 2020a), more than 100 million USD was invested in a startup that in the end failed to even deliver on the promise of easing our laundry-folding woes. This can be inquired into from several perspectives. Does the world, in the state it is in, need to solve this “problem” technologically? Was there nothing more important that the amount of money and expertise that went into the Laundroid could have been used for? The champions of innovation might here point out that innovation trajectories can often be complex, and that there is a chance that, for example, some innovation discovered in the creation of the Laundroid might later bloom into something far more impactful, and this is a fair comment. Yet this does not take away from the fact that as global warming is turning into an existential crisis for humanity, we may not be in a position to gamble quite so freely with our limited resources as we have done up until now, and in the studies I have done about the Laundroid there seems to be little if anything in the way of positive externalities. Hope may spring eternal, but hope alone cannot save the planet. The second crisis that innovation needs to address is the evermore problematic issue of resource depletion. Our current global system is such that we are overusing most planetary resources, and in many cases do not at current have feasible ways of switching these out. The resources most discussed today tend to be fossil fuels, pointing to the critical issue of energy. Here, again, innovation is something of a double-edged sword. Many forms of innovation are energy-intensive, but innovation can also aid in the conservation of energy, and this discussion has already been quite robust in innovation research (see, e.g., Adams et al. 2016; Suchek et al. 2021), and we are already seeing impressive progress in a transition toward green energy. A far less discussed resource-issue is that of materials that tend to be understood as mundane and plentiful. We may seldom discuss the connection between innovation and water, but the fact remains that without potable water, most other conversations are point less. With massive urbanization has come critical issues regarding how we can keep up water infrastructures, and ensure continued life on our planet. Twenty-one of the 37 biggest aquifers on the planet were already in 2015 past their “sustainable tipping point,” i.e. drying out (Richey et al. 2015), with obvious ramifications for the global food system. Another, possibly more surprising depletion event is occurring in sand. While it to a layman might seem impossible that there could be such a thing as a sand shortage, with deserts and beaches seen as endless reserves, the fact of the matter is that sand shortage, with sand being the planet’s second-most used resource after water, is becoming a crisis event. The issue lies in the fact that much of what we normally call sand cannot be used for the purposes it today is: construction, glass manufacture, and the production of, for example, silicon chips. Desert sand, for instance, is not coarse enough to be used in making cement and other critical infrastruc ture, making a radical shift toward a circular economy needed, in particular when it comes to the built environment (cf. Torres et al. 2021). The issue doesn’t become rosier when we consider less common raw materials. Rare-earth minerals, with lithium as the best known of these, are as their name indicates rare. They are used in basically all electronics, their mining is often highly non-sustainable, and they are very difficult to replace. Something similar could be said about helium, which has been called the world’s only completely non-renewable resource, and one that we are wasting at alarming rates. To most people, this might seem like a non-issue, as helium is famous for balloons and little else, but in reality it is a critical resource for our modern world. It can act as a super-coolant, and is important for things such as medical apparatuses such as MRI machines as well as the aforementioned quantum computers, which all rely on liquid helium-cooled superconductors. A third crisis refers more to social sustainability, but is also linked to the two above. The issue of social inequality may at first glance seem somewhat further removed from the above-mentioned innovation issues, but I would contend that such an assumption would be mistaken. There has been a long tradition in innovation thinking of assuming “trickle-down” effects, so that an innovation initially is only used by the wealthiest, most novelty-seeking individuals or organizations, and in many cases this has held. Computers, the car, electric light, the television, and refrig eration are all cases where the early models were expensive luxuries, but today seen as necessities. That said, there are no guarantees that this is a process that will always occur, and in addition we have over the last decades seen that despite what some in the innovation industry have referred to as a golden age (by any other name) of innovation, many have not seen their socio-economic standing change in anything like a positive way. On the contrary, a number of commentators (see, e.g., Klein 2020; Piketty 2014, 2020) have remarked on an increased polarization even in affluent Western countries, where the middle class is being hollowed out and where structures of privilege have ensured that innovation increasingly benefits the few, rather than the many. Contemporary innovation has been a boon to the urban elite I myself represent, where I by pressing a few buttons on my iPhone can get people to deliver an ever-expanding universe of goods to my door, yet done little to ease the life of, for exam ple, poor pensioners, who may not even be able to afford the smartphone that I see as an utter necessity. With some of the latest business model innovations acting as a way to establish digital serfdom, this trend looks unlikely to end anytime soon. Here it should also be noted that despite a tremendous amount of the innovation conversation focusing in particular on the younger demographic, the main aging trend is not a question of more and more young people crowding the economy, but rather the general graying of society. Here, again, innovation literature has been achingly slow to respond to a clear trend that has been evident for several decades, and where costs for care and often insufficient pension systems are setting many societies up for very challenging decades to come. All three of these cases, which deal not with great future potential but actual and increasing limitations, may force the hand of future innovation, in various ways. It is self-evident that the carefree innovation for the sake of just creating more stuff cannot be sustained. Innovators will need to pay far more attention to what the environmental impact of their innovations are, and societies need to develop robust conversations about what kinds of innovation should be encouraged and supported. Whereas the augmented innovator of the future might have a virtual lab with unending possibilities, they will also need to think long and hard about whether and how their creations can be produced in a world with limited resources, and be quite sure about the ways in which these resources can be re-utilized at, for example, a product’s end-of-life. Further, innovators will need to understand that the socio-political context innovations are introduced in, and consider whether there might be more deserving audiences and more pressing problems than those that the urban elites face. All this will require slow innovation. Not in the sense that innovation processes per se need to be slowed down, but so that our innovation thinking becomes more considered and capable of thinking beyond the moment of commercialization. Life in the Anthropocene forces us to think not in the weeks it takes to prototype, or the months that it might take to create an innovation, but in decades and generations. Life in a complex world also makes it an imperative to think about true diversity and inclusivity, rather than about how one best can sell yet another gadget or service to a middle-aged, white professor in central Copenhagen. This might sound like the pessimistic cries of yet another Cassandra, but this would be a most mistaken reading. This kind of slowing down, this kind of focus on greater care and consideration might be exactly what innovation needs in order to be something more than the rote production of novelties. This might be what breaks a flawed innovation ideology and enables us to transcend simplistic models of the economy and innovation.