The history of innovation isn’t an empirical fact, it’s a constructed narrative. Innovation is an ideology that relies on propaganda like the 1AC to continue

(Alf, InnovationandTech@Denmark, Images, Imperatives, and Ideology in the Innovation IndustryIn Debating Innovation: Perspectives and Paradoxes of an Idealized Concept ed. Rehn and Ortenblad)

The term ideology is rarely used in innovation research, and many of the innovation scholars I have queried about this fact seem to have a rather rudimentary understanding of what the term means in social the ory (see, e.g., Eagleton [1991]2007; Žižek 1989). Succinctly put, ideology is the name for a system of concepts which states unassailable truths about what in the world should be seen as normal and/or natural, and what should not. It is perhaps best known in its more narrow, political form (we rapidly recognize that socialism and capitalism are worldviews that, regardless of whether we agree with them or not, form competing systems of thought), but much everyday thinking is at heart ideological, as continual skepticism and querying can be quite a fatiguing way to go through life. We adopt ideologies because they make life easier and then trust other agents, such as researchers, to challenge that which needs to be challenged. Thus most of us would agree that democracy is the best polit ical system, by and large, and relatively few doubt the general efficiency of the market economy, even if we may be aware that criticism regarding both exists. The reason for this is self-evident and has been part of the critical apparatus since at least Marx (see, e.g., Jakubowski [1936]1976). Our systems, including systems of education, politics, and media, or what Marx would have called “the superstructure” continuously repeat the “truth” of these, establishing them as normal or at the very least the best of several bad systems. Note that I am not here making an argument regarding the efficiency or desirability (or lack thereof) of either system, merely pointing to how concepts become valorized, normalized, and naturalized. We are taught that market economy creates value, jobs, and well-being. We are taught that it is the functioning system and tales about the absurdity of competing systems. After a while, it all seems natural and necessary so that even if someone was to critique it (see, e.g., Rehn 2019), this feels mostly like a thought experiment. With concepts such as democracy and the market economy, these are of course very general, and things that in a very real way we feel engaged in and part of. Innovation is a murkier thing. We have of course engaged with innovations, but the amount of people who feel that they have been an active part of innovation is still limited. In order to establish the kind of ideological surety around it, with a currently limited but increasing attention to it in schools, another medium for enhancing the message was needed. The innovation industry, described above, is to my mind this medium. The manner in which innovation thinkers and speakers com modify the concept is perhaps more alike propaganda (see Stanley 2015) than education, but the end result is quite similar. The point of the end less books, conferences, workshops, etc. is in the end not to ensure that more innovation comes to be, but rather to valorize, normalize, and naturalize the concept. Over time, as the conceptual colonization ensures that all assumedly good things in the organized world—learning, change, cre ativity, imagination, renewal, and so on—are somehow connected to innovation, the very idea to critique this Great Good Thing starts looking like a perversion, like something unnatural. This again makes the innova tion imperative something that audiences of innovation messaging do not only accept, but actively desire. One of the things that I’ve always found most strange about the inno vation industry is the sado-masochistic subtext to it. Innovation “gurus” (which I too, despite feeling quite uncomfortable with the assignation, have been called) spend quite a lot of time berating their audiences implicitly or by proxy for failing to react quickly enough, for not taking enough risks, for failing to challenge enough things, and so on. The truly strange thing is that audiences take these criticisms in their stride and often actively urge speakers to go to even greater lengths in this. As I personally feel this direct model too patronizing, I tend to include myself in the masochism and have spent inordinate amounts of time standing on stages berating our communal failure as humans to break with tradition, open up our minds, and push our creativity. The more I do this, the greater the response in the audience. When I screech in nigh-hysterics about my hatred of innovation clichés and our incapacity to go beyond them, the audience has at times given me standing ovations. The dramaturgy here should be quite obvious. An ideology needs both constant repetition of its message and an easy to recognize set of heroes (Thomas Alva Edison, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, etc.), but it also requires villains and what in Stalinism and Maoism was known as “self-criticism” (see, e.g., Riegel 2000). Ideologies tend to have a utopian tint or tendency, and part of engaging with an ideology lies in manifesting that one hasn’t quite been good enough. This is why innovation books tend to overflow with the most extreme of successes, and why exorbitant wealth is often used as a proxy for the innovativeness of a specific individual. Elon Musk creates novel things and is in addition extremely rich, there fore Elon Musk is a great innovator. While the statement might look childish when presented in this manner, this is the subtext to much of what is written. It is also why my self-flagellation on the stages of innovation conferences is so popular. It makes me something akin to either a fire-and-brimstone preacher, crying for repentance from the flock, or a sacrificial lamb who debases himself as a stand-in for our collective failure (the connection to Derrida’s reading of Plato is obvious, but I will here pass it by). Thus the innovation ideology needs the innovation industry, not nec essarily to carry any specific messages or learnings about innovation, but to establish the narrative and dramaturgical logic of the same. Not entirely unlike the itinerant preachers that have always been part and parcel of Christianity, the innovation industry today circulates the globe, preaching the one true gospel. In a detail to delightful too leave out, it should be noted that a majority of the most important innovation speakers are from the U.S., and speak of “the speaking circuit”, in an almost perfect mirroring of how early US clergy, particularly from the Methodist Episcopal Church, often were “circuit riders,” taking the message across the then sparsely inhabited U.S. on a “preaching circuit.” By way of staged retellings of a truth assumed to be pure and normal and natural, both the circuit riders and their contemporary brethren make sure that the hoi polloi know their place and the imperatives that are to be fol lowed. Like in so many other kinds of ideological tellings, the drama is not incidental.