We make innovation better- divorced from ethics innovation produces serial policy failure

(Thomas Taro Lennerfors, IndustrialEngineering@Uppsala and Kiyoshi Murata, BusinessEthics@Meiji, Innovation Ethics In Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

In this chapter, we followed the current discourse on innovation ethics, focusing on the ethics of technological innovation in the for-profit sector. We then problematized the focus by pointing out the issue of competi tion and then constructed a potential way forward for innovation ethics. Innovation ethics: • must promote critical thinking and avoid reification of values. • needs to also focus on care and maintenance of existing values. • is processual and iterative and cannot be just invention ethics. • needs to be open to innovation in a variety of contexts. • acknowledges the infinite demands of ethics, but still is action-oriented. For researchers, our piece can hopefully contribute to stimulating a dis cussion about innovation ethics, going beyond current discussions of innovation ethics in different subfields. For practitioners, our approach to innovation ethics can problematize the ways in which ethics is discursively constructed in public and present an alternative where innovations need to be critically reflected upon and where innovations need to be seen as having good or bad consequences for the values that our society is expected to promote. We also argue that students in innovation studies, management of innovation, industrial management, as well as business and engineering degrees should be exposed to innovation ethics, to problematize an uncritically positive view about innovation, as well as students in non-technical degrees, some of whom might have a slightly more critical approach to technological progress. It is unlikely that progress toward a better society could be made without technological as well as other innovations, and an ability to think about a broader range of ethical implications can be valuable to bridge understandings among different parts of society and to create a joint exchange of meaning about what a desirable society is and what role innovation can play to advance it.