Debates over innovation should be our starting point- interrogating pro innovation bias is crucial to course correct SQ triumphalism that narrowly constrains our understanding. The alternative enhances and sustains innovation

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

Innovation, it’s a hell of a drug. Or, put in somewhat more diplomatic terms: Innovation, what a rush! Be it in business, politics, or academia, calls for innovation are rife and incessant, meant to entice us, energize us, extricate us out of the doldrums of everyday life. Innovation reshapes the world, breaks barriers, redefines everything it touches. Well, at least in the plentiful adverts and in the promises of the innovation evangelists. Innovation has become the panacea for all our problems, the goal of goals, the aim of all activities. That said, it is not always entirely clear what innovation is. We can all rattle off a list of innovations, not to mention innovators, but ask for a definition and things get a lot trickier. Not to mention fuzzier. Sure, there is no lack of definitions, but many if not most are very general, and some even circular. Some refer to change, others to value, others to acceptance. All are however adamant that innovation, be it what it may, is a good and desirable thing. Innovation saves nations, solves problems, uplifts people, and generates things; value, profits, jobs, change. In fact, some people close the circuit and simply proclaim that as long as good things emerge, innovation was the cause. This kind of contemporary update to the teleological argument has however led the field of innovation studies, broadly understood, into something of a muddle. With innovation defined so broadly as to encompass almost all kinds of positive outcomes of orga nized activity, the concept has also become both vague and difficult to debate in any deeper fashion. Revolutionary technology? It’s an innovation. Barely understandable improvement to a process? It’s an innovation as well. Innovation has become something of an all-purpose marker of progress, something that can be invoked whenever one feels that positive vibes are needed, wanted, or deserved. Corporations are prepared to spend untold sums to ensure that they have direct access to this fountain of corporate youth, and nation states are pushing for immense research and development funds to push themselves to a more fortuitous position on the “Most Innovative Nations” list. It is used to uplift certain workers, and to scare certain others. It is used to convince, to cajole, to market, to motivate, and to mollify. We all know it to be important, and a good thing, and altogether desirable. As we said, innovation—what a rush! We are of course being somewhat flippant, but the generality and the socio-moral certainties that define much of the current innovation discourse were key motivating factors in our wishing to edit this volume. Where many other innovation books keep repeating all the wonderful things that either innovation in general or some specific form of innovation can create, we wanted to bring in a more nuanced view, one where critiques of innovation were also given place. What we didn’t want, how ever, was a set of chapters that all attacked innovation, each one in their way. While there obviously should be space in the literature for such engagements as well, we were curious as to what would happen if one seriously started debating innovation, pro and con, for and against. An early idea and outline for this book was thus one where we would have a mass of innovation categories, and then a chapter arguing for its benefits and importance, and another one questioning the same. We envisioned incremental, radical, transformative, and systemic innovation, each with their own chapters for and against. We thought about product, service, and process innovation, each again with a chapter pro and a chapter con. We envision taking forms of innovation such as disruptive and open and organizational, all with nicely symmetrical chapters either hailing or challenging them. You get the drift. While we still think this could have been a rather charming book, it turned out that there aren’t that many people who are prepared to write a chapter against, for exam ple, radical innovation, or even a chapter for incremental such. Further, we came to the realization that such a book would in fact end up rehash ing arguments that have already been made in a thousand innovation books, including textbooks. This book still retains part of these ideas, and we are very happy to have a number of nicely paired chapters that present different takes on a key innovation issue or concept. In addition to this we have here gathered a couple of more general critiques of innovation, as a counterweight to the unreflected pro-innovation bias that dominates the literature, as well as a series of creative and/or critical perspectives on the field written in order to suggest new lines of inquiry. The critical tenor in some of these should however not be understood as wanting to present a blanket criticism of innovation, but rather as a way to engage with innovation in a broader, more objective fashion. Our job as researchers and scholars, even in a field such as innovation, is not to be evangelists and marketeers for a concept, but rather agents who wish to understand a complex phenomenon in as broad a manner as possible. It is thus important to point out that the chapters that are written in a more critical vein should be read as engagements, not as final words. All of our authors are well aware of the potential and the value that lies in innovation, even when they are writing specific criticisms against certain interpretations of the concept and the phenomenon. Yet, in order to have a robust debate, it is at times important to take on a proposition or a position that might not be one’s full view of the phenomenon, in order to inquire into the broader possibilities of the same. Thus we have in this book innovation speakers who criti cize the practice of innovation keynotes, researchers in open innovation who engage with the dark side of innovation, and thinkers who spend a considerable amount of time thinking about a cat and its relationship with creativity and innovation. They do so not in order to ban innovation keynotes, forbid open innovation, or to demand that the field of innova tion studies from now on focuses primarily on companion species, but in order to debate innovation, in a broad and productive manner. They do so not to diminish innovation, but to broaden our discussion regarding the same.

Empirics prove academic conceptions of innovation have global effects

Rehn, PhD, 23

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

Consider the notion of “disruptive innovation.” Originally the PhD thesis subject of the middle-aged Clayton Christensen, later turned into a somewhat popular HBR article (Bower and Christensen 1995) and then a mega-successful business book (Christensen 1997), the concept went from academic idea to corporate buzzword in very short order. Christensen did his fair bit to commercialize it, founding a consultancy around it and following up with books evermore tangentially connected to the original insight, but it was the innovation industry that truly made it. In a very short while, every innovation thinker worth their salt pre sented their own takes on disruptive innovation, sometimes following Christensen’s ideas around it, sometimes not. Blogs with names that worked in “disruptor” or “disruptive” started popping up, while many innovation speakers inserted them in their bios. Conferences did the same, and book titles were rewritten to incorporate the buzzword. Had this been the end of it, one could have understood it as a very superficial thing. A term becomes a fad and is then rapidly appropriated by a number of agents and used in a number of semiotic settings. It might have cheapened language and emptied narratives of meaning, but this is not in and of itself a major problem. What did become a major issue, as, for example, Jill Lepore (2014) pointed out, was that this mimetic iso morphism (see DiMaggio and Powell 1983) spread to the corporate world, with actual real-world effects. Corporations and CEOs started speaking of themselves as disrupters and pushed the people in their orga nizations to deliver on the vague promise that lay in the term. Christensen himself started producing a series of books (see, e.g., Christensen and Eyring 2011; Christensen et al. 2008, 2011, 2019, and so on) that uti lized the same concept in novel settings, with the decrease in marginal utility that tends to accompany such practices. The people with whom he collaborated, either through his consultancy or the aforementioned books, further commodified both the concept and its progenitor—by attaching his name to theirs, several popular innovation speakers built their business on their connection to Christensen. Disruptive innovation was thus an idea that was first developed in academia, turned into a book, which was turned into a consultancy and a preponderance of keynotes, which led to new studies that could be turned into a new book. Each step made disruptive innovation more and more of a brand and an image, one that could be copied and reiterated the world over. As a side note, the “Always Challenge The Old Ways” coffee mug from Startup Vitamins can be yours for only 16 USD. Along the way, however, something else happened. Lepore (2014) pointed out the academic weakness in the concept, noting that many of the original cases used to argue for it had methodological or other weak nesses (such as not being the successes they were hailed as). She noted but paid less attention to the fact that the influence of the concept, and Christensen’s successful marketing of the same, was vast outside of his own books and consultancy. Organizations the world over adapted to the notion of disruptive innovation by setting up their own initiatives, assign ing people roles such as “innovation evangelists” or “Chief Disruption Officer” (although it seems that this role was far more prevalent in inno vation articles and keynotes than ever in actual top management teams), and prominently mentioning disruption in their strategies. Collecting hard data on the overall success/failure of these initiatives and engage ment is nigh on impossible, but the radical drop in them would indicate that for many disruption has already seen its heyday. While the getting was good, however, tremendous amounts of time and money were spent chasing the disruptive dream, at the cost of other, potentially more pro ductive engagements. The well-packaged, commodified term, eagerly pushed by the many agents of the innovation industry (including Christensen himself) played out as a kind of conceptual colonization that pushed out other understandings of the word. What we now have to ask ourselves is how this was so eagerly consumed.