Innovation discourse assumes its own utility, ignoring questions of implementation – assume their authors are zealots and innovation doesn’t work.

Marko; August 11; Lecturer at the university of helsinki’s department of social research and author; The Digital Age and it’s Discontents, “The Blind Spots of Digital Innovation Fetishism,” Ch. 2, P. 31-32] tc

Innovation is a central keyword of economic policy planning in advanced capitalist countries. Above all, it signifies a call to reform all economic branches and social institutions in ways that make them more supportive of national competitiveness. Accordingly, universities are today not only sites for the study of innovation, but they are also increasingly imagined as business-oriented innovation powerhouses, especially by industry lobbies that find universities lacking in entrepreneurial vigour. Legions of educational and business publishers have answered these calls by churning out books and guides that aim to enhance innovation activities in private companies and public institutions. Adding to the same trend, the business press and the media in general frequently publicize stories on firms and entrepreneurs that are considered model innovators. As a result of these combined ideological efforts, public discussions and the media are today filled with calls to transform state institutions, labour markets, education and even basic cultural values so that these would better serve the spirit of innovation, upon which not only the health of the economy but whole societies is seen to depend. Due to the phenomenal growth of innovation rhetoric, it is no wonder that the concept has recently aroused critical interest. Paul A. David, professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University (2012: 510), writes of ‘the innovation fetish’: an ‘excessive fixation upon innovation’ among the economic, political and educational elites, who have endowed it ‘with seemingly magical or spiritual powers associated with animistic or shamanistic rituals’. Pointing to similar aspects, Valaskivi (2012) writes of the rise of ‘innovationism’, a quasireligious discourse focusing on innovation that is carried forward especially by social media gurus, information and communication technology (ICT) company leaders, management consultants and researchers working in think tanks and business schools. It promotes the entrepreneurial values of individualism, inspiration, risk-taking and competitiveness, and attaches these to the key symbols of innovation, such as successful start-up companies and Silicon Valley. The latter has served as the ‘spiritual’ centre of innovation enthusiasm, while ICT entrepreneurs have been singled out as public role models that, together with new ICT and digital innovations, represent capitalist dynamism. These discourses form the core of contemporary digital innovation fetishism. But why call such discourses fetishistic? In traditional anthropological terms, a fetish refers to a religious object that is assumed to possess supernatural powers. Yet, the Durkheimian conclusion that innovation discourses offer ‘an accepted, self-evident, future-oriented—and collective—way of imagining a better future’ (Valaskivi 2012: 150) is not sufficient by itself. It registers a ‘religious’ dimension of innovation discourses—a means by which a collective may symbolically worship itself—but leaves out their ideological nature and how this effort takes place under the specific social relations determined by capitalist commodity production. Leading innovation discourses and practices have different effects for different groups of people, depending on their material and cultural capacities. The appeals to innovation and creativity may thus be empowering for the so-called high-net-worth individuals who invest in startup companies, or for the motivational speakers who cash in on those appeals on the business speaking circuit. However, they are much less empowering and more discouraging for low-paid workers who work long hours for those companies or in the gigantic warehouses of digital platform capitalism.