Apply strict scrutiny to affirmative evidence- innovation studies is epistemically closed and ontologically conservative, this renders the entire 1AC suspect. Voting negative opens possibility of more nuanced understanding of innovation

(Alf, Innovation@Denmark and Anders, Innovation@Agder Introduction In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

Here, it might be helpful to mention a novel philosophical concept, one originally deployed in ecological studies, namely that of the “hyperob ject.” In 2013, Timothy Bloxam Morton wrote the book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Morton 2013), in which they developed a notion they had introduced in earlier work (see Morton 2010). In the former work, they were interested in objects and/or con cepts that were so massive and so distributed in time and space that it becomes impossible to understand them specifically as themselves, rendering them only thinkable through their symptoms or local manifesta tions. They originally used the term to understand a phenomenon like global warming, which is difficult to “see” and think about precisely because it is so all-encompassing. We can see the “footprint” of the hyper object, but never really the hyperobject in and of itself, as it is created by a number of complex relations between heterogenous objects. In addi tion, hyperobjects are “viscous,” in that they attach themselves to other objects, material and discursive, even to the point where trying to resist a hyperobject makes you evermore stuck to the same. The astute reader will by now have picked up on the fact that we are gesturing toward the fact that innovation might be a hyperobject as well. In fact, it lives up quite well to the criteria that Morton established. It is massively distributed in time and space, to the point where most things can be seen as innovation depending on which spatiotemporal position you choose to occupy. It clearly transcends specificity, in that things as far apart as a completely new product and a slightly different manner of sell ing the same are both referred to with the same term. It is massive, and seemingly ever-expanding, while at the same time only viable in the spe cific manifestations it appears to us at. Here, it is important to note that Morton’s argument was ontological, not nihilistic. We live in a world populated by objects that are simply to massive, too far beyond our capacity for perception, that a more humble ontology becomes necessary (N.B. Morton is connected to the emerging field of object-oriented ontology). This certainly holds for innovation. As Martin (2016) points out in his “Twenty challenges for innovation studies,” a key problem for innovation studies has been the tendency to look only where it is easiest (and most profitable) to do so. This is very much in line with an old joke, one that has been told since at least the 1920s, in which a drunk man is searching under a streetlight for an object (keys or some money, depending on which version you’ll hear), and is interrupted by a policeman: “–What are you doing?” “–I’m looking for my keys/bill/wallet!” “–Did you lose them here?” “–No, I lost them down the road!” “–Then why don’t you look there?” “–The light’s much better here!” In a similar manner, Martin takes innovation studies to task for mainly studying the things that have been easy to study, ignoring the “dark inno vation” (Martin 2016) that exists outside of the contemporary street lights. To this comes the question of studying the dark sides of innovation (see, e.g., Coad et al. 2021; Sveiby et al. 2012), those parts that are not merely marginalized for being more difficult to find, but those actively shunned for not fitting in with the existing paradigm. What is needed then, and what has been the driver of this book, is less clarity about innovation, in the simplistic sense of the word, and more challenges and debate. Our aim with this book was never to produce a final word, but to show that a hyperobject such as innovation needs to be engaged with not in a streamlined manner, with singular epistemologies, but on the contrary by highlighting the many perspectives and parleys and paradoxes that are a natural outcome of any engagement with a hyperobject. We are here not presenting the end to a debate, nor even the beginning of such an end, but calling out an end to simplistic and limited ways of trying to come to grips with something as grand, as strange, as interobjective, and as viscous as innovation is. We are not here to close the book on innovation, but rather to open the same. We are not here to fight over demarcations, as we are fully aware that the phenomenon we are interested in will always already make quick work of any attempt to establish such. We are here to allow the hyperobject to be a hyperobject, grandiose and unknowable, present and absent, hypermodern and eldritch, all at the same time. We are here for the debates, not the declarations. We are happy to stand in the shadows of paradox, rather than pretending that our epistemological flashlights are magic. We are here to do what many innovation scholars resist and spend their careers fighting against—answering the call to take innova tion seriously, as the strange hyperobject it is.