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21 KB – 67 Pages
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Abstract Innovation is everywhere. In the world of goods (technology) certainly, but also in the realm of words. Innovation is discussed in scientific and technical literature, in social sciences such as sociology, management and economics, and in the humanities and arts. Innovation is also a central idea in the popular imaginary, in the media and in public policy. How has innovation acquired such a central place in our society? This paper looks at innovation as category, and suggests an outline for a genealogical history. It identifies the concepts that have defined innovation through history, from its very first meaning as novelty in the Middle Ages to the most recent interpretations in sociology and economi cs. The paper suggests a genealogical history of innovation through the following three concepts: Imitation Invention Innovation. 3
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Introduction Innovation is everywhere. In the world of goods (technology) cer tainly, but also in the realm of words: innovation is di scussed in the scientific and technical literature, in social sciences like history, sociology, management and economics, and in the humanities and arts. Innovation is also a central idea in the popular imaginary, in the media, in public policy and is part of everybody™s vocabulary. Briefly stated, innovation has become th e emblem of the modern society, a panacea for resolving many problems, a nd a phenomenon to be studied. As H. Nowotny defines our epoch: it is a fascination and quest for innovation (Nowotny, 2008; 2006). The quest for innovation is so strong that some go so far as to suggest that drugs like Ritalin and Adderall, used to treat psychiatric and neurological conditions, should be prescribed to the healthy as a cognitive enhancement fitechnologyfl for improving th e innovative abilities of our species (Greely et al., 2008). This suggests three questions. First, why has innovation acquired such a central place in our society or, put different ly, where precisely does the idea of innovation come from? To many, innovation is a relatively recent phenomenon and its study more recent yet: innova tion has acquired real importance in the twentieth century. In point of fact, however, innovation has always existed. The concept itself emerged centuries ago. Th is suggests a second question: why did innovation come to be defined as technological innovation? Many people spontaneously understand innovation to be technological innovation. The literature itself takes this for gran ted. More often than not, studies on technological innovation simply use the term innovation, alth ough they are really concerned with technological innovation. However, etymologically and historically, the concept of innovation is much broader. How, when and by whom did its meaning come to be firestrictedfl to technology? Third, why is innovation generally understood, in many milieus, as commercialized innovation ? It is hard today to imagine technology without thinki ng of the market. One frequently hears 5
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of innovations that are marketed by firms, but other types of innovation are either rapidly forgotten or rarely discussed. By contrast, every individual is to a certain extent innovative; artists are innovative, scientists are innovative, and so are organizations in their day-to-day operations. To answer these three questions, this paper looks at innovation as a category and at its historical development. The pape r is not a history of innovation itself (or innovations), neither a contextual history. It looks rather at the representations of innovation and the discourses held in the name of innovation, namely since the term first appeared in the Middle Ages : how the public, innovators themselves, and academics, and particularly the th eories of the latter, have understood innovation and talked about it. This paper offers very preliminary ideas toward a genealogical history of the category fiinnovationfl. It identifies the concepts that have defined innovation through history, and that have led to innovation as a central category of modern society. It concentrates on the ficreativefl dimension of innovation. This dimension got into innovation in the twentieth century. At the very beginning, innovation was rather concerned with change, broadly understood, and had nothing to do with creativity. Innovation as change will be dealt with in another paper (Godin, 2009b). The paper is programmatic in the sense that it suggests a program of research or outline for such a genealogical history, a history that remains to be written. In the Archeology of Scientific Reason, M. Foucault asked fiComment se fait-il que tel concept soit apparu et nul autre à sa place?fl, (Foucault, 1 969: 39-40) that is, under what conditions does a word come to mean what it signifies for us today? To Foucault, a genealogy is a study of descent rather than origins: the details and accidents, the forces and struggles that accompany every conceptual beginning and its further fisolidificationfl (Foucault, 1984). 6
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category emerged: economy (trade), politics (the courts), and culture (expressiveness, awareness of history). This paper advances three hypotheses in order to guide a genealogical history of innovation as category. The first hypothesis starts with the idea that innovation is about novelty (arising from human creativity), as etymology, dictionaries and history suggest. As such, innovation is of any kind, not only material or technological. In this sense, innovation as category has a very long history. However, over time the conjunction of two factors gave preeminence to technological and commercialized innovation in representations: 1) the culture of things and its capitalistic corollary: industrial development through technology, 2) academics, the study of technology, and the conceptual frameworks that followed for policies in science and economic growth. In fact, there is a dialectics here between reality and language. Events and changes in the world gave rise to new categories; the latter in turn brought to light changes in the world and, in doing so, contributed to these changes. The second hypothesis is that the history of innovation as ficreativityfl is that of three concepts (and their derivatives): Imitation Invention Innovation . Certainly, a lot has been written on imitation (literary theory and art theory), as well as invention (history, sociology, management a nd economics of technology). But no one has ever brought the two concepts together in a genealogical history, and neither has anyone looked at their contribution to the category innovation. Through Western history, imitati on and invention have been contrasted, or are in tension. The dichotomy reaches its resolu tion with the idea of innovation in the twentieth century, particularly the idea of innovation as process: invention and imitation are two sequential steps in the process leading to innovation. The third hypothesis is about innovation as a break with the past . Innovation and the discourses on innovation serve to make sense of modern practices and values. On the one hand, innovation represents continuity with the past. It is continuity in 8
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9 the sense that innovation is about novelty, an idea that was present in many forms before innovation took on a central place in representations, as we will see. It is also continuity in the sense that innovation is, to many, concerned with technological invention, which is a dominant understanding of what invention came to mean over time. However, on the other hand innovation is a break with the past in the sense that it suggests that invention per se is not enough. There has to be use and adoption of the invention, namely innovation, in order for benefits to accrue. At this stage of the project, the first two parts of this paper (imitation, invention) are based on secondary sources. The third part (innovation) is composed entirely of original research and constitutes the core of the paper. It identifies the theories on innovation proper, and their emergen ce over the twentieth century. The period covered in this paper ends around 1970-90, which was when innovation developed its current understanding in representations, and when the literature on innovation exploded. 3 Imitation Imitation is a concept of Greek origin. McKeon (1936) has documented how Plato™s philosophy is entirely concerned with imitation and its many senses and opposites: appearances (or images) Œ versus reality; falsity Œ versus truth. To Plato, even physical objects are imitations, compared to God and true nature. But it is through Aristotle that the concept of imitation got its main influence. To Aristotle, (practical) arts imitate nature ( mimesis). Such an understanding of art gave rise to imitatio as the central problem of art, with pejorative overtones, then to imitation as inspiration (Abrams, 1953; Nahm, 1956). As M. H. Abrams has stated, the mimetic orientation was the mo st primitive aesthetic theory (Abrams, 3 The author wants to thank the following colleagues for comments on a first draft of this paper: Irwin Feller, Paul Forman, Deni se Lemieux, Pamela Long, Pierre Lucier, Christine Macleod, Reijo Miettinen, Helga Nowotny, Jean-Jacques Salomon.
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10 1953: 8). 4 Art imitates the world of appearance. The fiartistfl extracts the form of the natural world and imposes it upon an artificial medium (Abrams, 1953: 11). In fact, fiwherever the Renaissance theorist turned, he usually found the concept of invention somehow subordinated to the imitation of naturefl (Kushner, 1980: 144). 5 However, according to most theories, imitation is only fiinstrumental toward producing effectsfl (Abrams, 1953: 14). In their quest for social status, artists debated for centuries on how to distance themselves from a conception of their work as mere copying. As E. T. Bannet s uggested recently, imitation is a literary mechanism for the production of differe nce (Bannet, 2005). Until the mid- eighteenth century, imitation was presented as a positive practice, not one that was distrusted or pejorative. To rhetoricians, imitation is a method for teaching (Clark, 1951). To Renaissance artists, imitation certainly makes use of nature as model, or exemplar. However, it is not slavish or mechan ical imitation, but selective borrowing and creative copying. Similarly, while humanist writers in the Renaissance make use of past authors (antiquity) as models, it is aemulatio , and the writer enriches the tradition. In fact, the artist, the poet and the writer in the Renaissance were not yet being judged for originality (Force, 2005; Cole, 1995; Wittkover, 1965), but rather for interpretati on. There was little sense of copyright Œ although accusations of plagiarism abounded (Hathaway, 1989; White, 1935). And so it is with science and arts. To Francis Bacon, one comes closer to real knowledge of nature by imitating nature . As he described his experimental method in Magna Instauratio: fithese things are quite new; totally new (): and yet they are copied from a very ancient model, the world itself and the nature of 4 On the representation of art before the Greek fitheoryfl of mimesis Œ art as fipresentificationfl of the divine rather than a human creative act Œ, see Vernant and Zeitlin (1991). 5 On the different of meaning of imitation of nature in art, see Lovejoy (1927) and Lovejoy and Boas (1935). In history, the finaturalist presump tionfl is a widespread idea: what humans do, in literature, arts, crafts and science is a (continua tion or) perfection of nature (Close, 1969). To many, above all philosophers, nature is generally considered as more primitive and more authentic. Nature functions as a cultural value and social norm. Nature has a moral authority (Bensaude-Vincent and Newman, 20 07; Daston and Vidal, 2004).
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11 things and of the mindfl. 6 In the world of trade and goods, imitation is also positively appreciated. M. Berg and H. Clifford have documented how imitations served as substitutes for imported commodities in eighteenth-century Britain (Berg, 1999; Clifford, 1999). Imitation was a way to give access to luxury goods (decorative goods, clothing, household wares) to the people, through fisemi- luxuriesfl. In the case of the decorative arts over the same period, R. Benhamou has documented the contribution of imitati on to lowering the costs of original products (Benhamou, 1991). Briefly stated, imitation is taken for granted and is a common practice. Imitation brings advant ages to the people; it represents economic opportunity. In more recent history, R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter (1982), in a classic of the literature on technological innovation, suggested imitation as one of two strategies available to firms, the other being i nnovation. As early as 1966, T. Levitt from Harvard Business School suggested the same idea: fibecause no single company can afford even to try to be first in everything in its fieldfl, a company is compelled fito look to imitation as one of its survival and growth strategiesfl (Levitt, 1966: 65). In fact, to Levitt fithe greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitationfl. He was referring to the fact that when ficompetitors in the same industry subsequently copy the innovator [a given firm or industry which has produced something th at has never been seen before], even though it is something new for them, then it is not innovation, it is imitationfl (Levitt, 1966: 63). A company creates fiits own imitative equivalents of the innovative products created by othersfl. Not only, then, is imitation a good practice, but imitation has often been portrayed as being invention itself. The view in the Middle Ages of the work of artisans is that of art learned by imitating nature, but in so doing, the artisan changes nature, as claimed by the alchemists (Newman, 1989). Equally, in Renaissance literary 6 On Bacon™s description of his utopian laboratory (Salomon™s house) as imitation of nature, see his description of instruments in New Atlantis (1627).
21 KB – 67 Pages