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In this article, I will explore how the underlying research values of ‘openness’ and ‘mutual responsiveness’, which are central to open science practices, can be integrated into a new ethos of science. Firstly, I will revisit Robert Merton's early contribution to this issue, examining whether the ethos of science should be understood as a set of norms for scientists to practice ‘good’ science or as a set of research values as a functional requirement of the scientific system to produce knowledge, irrespective of individual adherence to these norms. Secondly, I will analyse the recent codification of scientific practice in terms of ‘scientific integrity’, a framework that Merton did not pursue. Based on this analysis, and illustrated on the case of COVID-19 as a case in which the institution of science was challenged to deliver urgently on societal desirable outcomes, I will argue that promoting open science and its core norms of collaboration and openness requires broader governance of the institution of science in its relationship with society at large, rather than relying solely on self-governance within the scientific community through a new ethos of science. This conclusion has implications for re-evaluating research assessments, suggesting that the evaluation of the scientific system should take precedence over evaluating individual researchers, and that incentives should be provided to encourage specific research behaviour rather than solely focusing on individual research outputs.

The core insight of this thoughtful and provocative article is that science has become engineering and must be re-governed appropriately. Science today is as much artefact constructing as it is knowledge-producing. Certified knowledge is found through certified construction; science has become technoscience. As such, received practices of and models for governance need re-examining. It is not possible here to address the full range of insights and questions that René von Schomberg’s challenging paper puts on the table. His argument is clearly the outgrowth of years of critical reflection in the science policy trenches of the European Commission. I would wager that there’s no one who has thought longer, harder, and at greater depth about these issues. I will concentrate my comments on the question concerning engineering.

Von Schomberg’s call to place mutual responsiveness – which I understand as the ability of researchers and the research system as a whole to foster meaningful exchanges and learn from novel experiences, no matter where those originate – at the core of Open Science and related efforts to reform the scientific landscape is both timely and significant. Widespread sharing is not enough to guarantee responsible and inclusive research, nor are vague appeals to improve research culture, whatever it is that such culture may turn out to include (Leonelli, 2023). Rather, emphasis needs to be placed on the conditions under which sharing materials, methods and insights – and debating the goals and directions towards which these may be put to use – may improve research exchange, communication and scrutiny, resulting in scientific outputs that are both reliable and socially responsive. Hence von Schomberg’s focus on the interplay between institutional and behavioural features of science and his plea for a reform in governance structures, such as initiated by COARA, are very well-taken. He is, however, too quick to dismiss the importance of some degree of autonomy for those involved in creating knowledge. To show why this matters, I here briefly discuss two of von Schomberg’s additional claims: (1) his focus on ‘knowledge actors’ as the protagonists of research efforts; and (2) his critique of the effectiveness of self-governance efforts by researchers.

Von Schomberg offers a compelling examination of key open science principles and their potential role in fostering responsible research and innovation (RRI). Utilizing Merton's Ethos of Science framework, the paper constructs a series of arguments supporting a central thesis: “the transition towards open science is vital to facilitate RRI.” This transition necessitates significant institutional reforms within the scientific community and adjustments to incentive structures that promote the adoption of open and mutually responsive practices. The manuscript reframes the discourse surrounding responsibility and responsiveness in light of the evolving landscape of open science, shifting the focus from normative commitments to actionable frameworks in research and open science practices. Overall, the position paper strives to bridge the gap between idealised models of scientific communities based on RRI principles and the reality of actual scientific endeavour (Anderson et al., 2007; Politi, 2021, 2024). However, it is important to acknowledge certain omissions that could enrich the analysis. Firstly, a more comprehensive examination of the profound crisis facing science amidst the increasing marketisation and commodification of academia and research would provide valuable context beyond discussions of system failures related to productivity and reproducibility. Secondly, a more nuanced and critical approach to conceptualising open science would enrich the discussion, considering its multifaceted nature and potential pitfalls. Thirdly, the validity of the Mertonian framework and its selective analysis of values, particularly its exclusive focus on the norm of communism. Lastly, a deeper exploration of the challenges and promises inherent in the pursuit of responsible Open Science within ongoing institutional processes.

It is hard to disagree with the thrust of René von Schomberg’s position paper. It is driven by the worry that current conceptions of “open science” are all too impoverished – that they need to be complemented by the social practice of “mutual responsiveness”. In terms of political theory or notions of democracy, on the one hand, in terms of socially relevant research practice, on the other hand, only an ambitious commitment to open science will be robust enough to make a difference and contribute to the solution of pressing problems. In contrast, it is paying lip service only to the ideal of openness when “open science” becomes reduced to “open access publishing” or data storage rituals. As von Schomberg shows, this might actually deepen disparities and redundancies within dysfunctional science.

René von Schomberg’s article (von Schomberg, 2024) makes an invigorating case for the co-responsibility of societal actors to give direction to the pursuit of science. In this reply, I wish to endorse his position as a much-needed reconceptualisation in the face of societal challenges and internal scientific developments. At the same time, I urge that there remain theoretical and practical intricacies in attempting to steer science.

Personal comment on the responses to “Towards a New Ethos of Science or a Reform of the Institution of Science? Merton Revisited and the Prospects of Institutionalizing the Research Values of Openness and Mutual Responsiveness” by René von Schomberg.

Over the past decade, we have witnessed a gradual and consistent evolution of research practices towards a more open science. This shift has been driven by both internal expectations within the scientific community and external demands from research policies. The push for open science within the scientific community has been further reinforced by negative trends such as slow publication processes, criticism of the peer review system, and challenges in reproducing research results. Moreover, the urgent need for open science outside the scientific community has been highlighted by the COVID-19 crisis, which exposed the inefficiency of the scientific system in responding timely to public concerns. Transitioning towards open science is essential for enabling responsible research and innovation. In this Special Issue, René von Schomberg's position paper explores how the underlying research values of ‘openness’ and ‘mutual responsiveness’, which are central to open science practices, can be integrated into a new ethos of science. Several colleagues then comment on the article propositions, raising concerns and reinforcing criticism towards the current Ethos (and practices) of Science nowadays. This Special Edition is closed by von Schomberg response to the critiques raised by Carl Mitcham, Mónica Edwards-Schachter, Sabina Leonelli, Lukas Fuchs, and Alfred Nordmann.

Innovation governance has risen to prominence as a central theme in nurturing and framing contemporary debates surrounding innovation policies. This Special Issue features contributions that critically examine the “complexities of governance and the governance of complexity” (Jessop, 2020), aiming for a deeper understanding of innovation governance processes. The selected papers build on some discussions from the inaugural international NOvation Online Forum (held from 15 to 17 September 2021) around innovation policies and governance practices. The issue focuses on a critical approach to dilemmas and challenges associated with innovation governance in the context of sustainability transformations and its intricate relationships with ethical, social, economic, and environmental concerns. Despite the abundant literature on the concept of governance, the term governance of innovation or innovation governance becomes diffuse and used in many different ways and perspectives. Some authors refer to innovation policy governance (Kuhlman, 2000; Fagerberg & Hutschenreiter, 2020), and “innovation” usually appears as part of the governance of STI and as a less visible guest into the governance of science and technology, and the governance of change of socio-technical systems (Borrás & Edler, 2014, 2020).

In this work, we seek to answer the question, what are the main logics and enablers underlying the implementation of TIP policies in countries of the Global South? We address this question using the Path-transformative heuristic (Pinzón-Camargo et al., 2020; Pinzón-Camargo, 2022). This heuristic combines two approaches, path dependency and institutional entrepreneurship theories, to explain the processes, decisions, and actions carried by actors in building an alternative path and how they face internal and external pressures that could support or damage their processes. Using an illustrative case based on the Colombian Social Appropriation of Science, Technology and Innovation policy, we examine in-depth interviews and secondary data on the underlying logics and enablers of innovation policies with transformative potential. This work allows us to identify six underlying logics in three of the four phases of the Path-transformative heuristic and six enablers extended through all the transformative pathway. Those elements bring a starting point to unfold and better understand TIP in the Global South.

Since the 1990s, changing ways of producing and circulating knowledge have been accompanied by debates that diagnose and call for change in the relationship between science, society, politics, and innovation. Most recently in Europe, some of these debates emphasize the concept of responsible research and innovation (RRI). In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of different territorial RRI-pilots within the Horizon 2020-funded project TRANSFORM. In these pilots, different translations of RRI become visible. RRI (1) gets translated as participatory and deliberative modes of innovation governance aimed at transformative change, (2) takes the shape of citizen science projects; and (3) is enacted as participatory agenda setting and (plans for a) citizen assembly. We argue that it is the often-invisible work of establishing, nurturing, and caring for relationships within the territorial R&I ecosystems – what can the thought of as ongoing “maintenance work” – that creates the conditions for more responsive modes of innovation governance, and thus a shift towards transformative change in innovation policy. Through describing these translations and the related practices we will direct attention to the potential, challenges, and systemic barriers of this kind of work.

This article critically analyzes public procurement of innovation (PPI) as an instance of using markets or market-like aspects as a means to resolve public concerns. It reports findings from a case of procuring radiation therapy equipment for a university hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. By extending a line of literature built on economic sociology as well as science and technology studies (STS), the study elaborates on public actors’ efforts in framing markets to promote innovation. The case illustrates how the participating actors constructed the notion of innovativeness to be introduced into health care as means of addressing various public concerns. It also reveals the intended—and unintended—consequences of PPI as manifested in various actors’ claims on the value of PPI realized in practice. The study suggests that it is extremely difficult to frame a market for the realization of innovation via procurement as a policy instrument because we cannot predict the ultimate impacts of devices and practices employed in such initiatives. By formulating a practice-based critique of PPI, our study invites important questions about the potentiality of such instruments for governing innovation without delimiting their consequences to the success-or-failure dichotomy as prescribed in predefined tools and strategies.

Innovation heuristics offer guidance on how to navigate through the complex dynamics of innovation governance. However, further discussion is needed on the premises of such analytical tools to inquire on their implications on innovation policy and practice. This paper builds on the innovation policy dance metaphor to better grasp the ever-changing interplays (or dance) between innovation practice (I), policy (P) and theory (T). We critically assess the basic underlying assumptions of this metaphor, by examining the extent to which its heuristic pretensions are relevant in the Latin American context. To do so, we explore three illustrative cases in Colombia, shedding light on some crosscutting opportunities and gaps for the dancing metaphor across different innovation I-P-T situations. Some derived lessons suggest that dancing occurs within and/or between different governance levels, where variables such as politics shape the innovation I-P-T interplay and time defines first and second order learning pathways.

Protected areas are tourist destinations where, contrary to popular imaginaries, communities live. In and around those territories, actors implement solutions that meet the needs of their community (Soubirou & Jacob, 2019); they demonstrate social innovation. In doing so, they contribute to new compromises and new forms of regulation or governance (Klein et al., 2014). Sometimes, out of attachment to the territory, they choose alternative paths (Crosetti & Joye, 2021) such as NOvation (Godin & Vinck, 2017). The objective of this study is to analyze how mountain touristic territories articulated around protected areas generate innovation in order to face the challenges they encounter. In the form of a multiple case study, three territories are studied: Mont-Orford (Canada), Banff (Canada) and Aspen (United States). Contemporary issues are discussed in the continuity of their historical roots (see Crosetti & Joye, 2021). The results highlight the specificity of mountain tourism territories where protected areas are found, and the resulting double valuation they are subjected to (by tourism and conservation), that sometimes constrain but also foster (social) in-NOvation (in-NOvation [sociale] in French), a term introduced to name a broadened conception of innovation. It manifests itself in unsuspected spheres: the past, nature, within government institutions, through governance and dynamics of the territories. Touristic and protected mountain territories are not “on the fringes” of innovation, rather, their characteristics (rugged relief, relative eccentricity, exceptional character) make them the breeding ground for a distinction between (social) in-NOvation and the leitmotif of innovation “at any cost” (Everett Rogers, 1963 in Godin & Vinck, 2017). Considering recurring or acute issues, this study contributes to the scientific study of innovation, which is imbued with the prevailing pro-innovation bias (Boutroy et al., 2015; Godin & Vinck, 2017).

Innovation governance has risen to prominence as a central theme in nurturing and framing contemporary debates surrounding innovation policies. This Special Issue features contributions that critically examine the “complexities of governance and the governance of complexity” (Jessop, 2020), aiming for a deeper understanding of innovation governance processes. The selected papers build on some discussions from the inaugural international NOvationOnline Forum (held from 15 to 17 September 2021) around innovation policies and governance practices. The issue focuses on a critical approach to dilemmas and challenges associated with innovation governance in the context of sustainability transformations and its intricate relationships with ethical, social, economic, and environmental concerns. Over the past few decades, the concept has gained significant traction, particularly in the corporate sector, as organizations seek to enhance their innovation governance practices. This shift reflects a broader trend toward proactive and anticipatory policymaking designed to effectively address complex challenges and uncertainties (Stoker, 1998; Diercks et al., 2019; Tõnurist & Hanson, 2020). Prominent examples include the emergence of Claims to Responsible Innovation (RI) and Transformative Innovation Policy (TIP), both of which are regarded as essential tools for addressing societal issues and driving systemic change toward sustainability (Diercks et al., 2019; Ludwig & Macnaghten, 2020). Additionally, there is a growing emphasis on enhancing civil society participation through a surge in Public Engagement (PE) initiatives. These endeavors are connected to the proliferation of governance labs and methods aimed at fostering optimistic discussions on participatory citizenship within public policy and innovation processes (e.g., the role of governance labs and Public Sector Innovation Laboratories, PSIL). In summary, innovation governance encompasses a wide spectrum of perspectives on innovation, mostly focused on innovation systems and interrelationships and the conditions that facilitate thriving innovation. It involves the establishment of decision-making processes and structures that support the management of innovation activities, encompassing the definition of clear roles, responsibilities, and guidelines for innovation, as well as ongoing monitoring and evaluation of innovation performance. The following papers provide different aspects of governance that are not generally taken into account in the literature, paying attention to the barriers and conundrums that arise in innovation processes and practices.

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies. Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a “a poor substitute for a welfare state” and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (Aiken, 2002, 2006, 2007; Grenier, 2009; Pharaoh, Scott & Fisher, 2004). Still, on the whole, the literature in the last twenty years has been overwhelmingly interested in promoting social enterprise (SE) and SI as (a) an inherently good thing, (b) a solution to all problems and (c) a politically neutral complement to neo-liberal economics globally.

In this article, we trace a rising tide of criticality to highlight three waves in a sea of social entrepreneurship/social innovation (SE/SI) research. Our aim is to draw attention to counter, alternative and critical perspectives in the field and how ‘dangerous’ their co-option by right wing narratives is. We review what we believe to be three waves in the development of a critical research agenda undertaken by a cohort of academics who, in their loyalty to the field, have sought to unpick the underlying assumptions in the practice of, and academic reflection on, social innovation. We set out the early instrumentalist critique, in which the success and social utility of SE/SI is questioned. We secondly highlight a post-structuralist shift, in which hidden and unheard voices and perspectives are welcomed and celebrated. The third wave, for us, constitutes a dangerous threat to the SE/SI project, threatening to undermine and co-opt the first two waves, as has happened in other related fields of intellectual endeavour. We position this paper to not only engage with scholars who challenge the normative assumptions behind social innovation research, but also to draw attention to the entry of right-wing politics in post-modernist critical theory. It is not that everything in this third wave is bad, but that everything becomes unexpectedly dangerous, especially if we uncritically adopt reflexivity, naturalization and performativity as politically and morally neutral positions. Contra to Foucault, in adopting a critical realist stance, we begin to propose that ‘the social’, posed as an inherently ‘good’ thing, is an ontological reality that is knowable, albeit given that our knowledge of what is ‘good’ is nonetheless limited and partial. In the first Skoll World Forum (2004) some activists put up posters in the toilets of Said Business School warning delegates, ‘beware social entrepreneurship: a wolf in sheep’s clothes!’ (Nicholls & Young, 2008, p. 272). We conclude our paper warning that SE/SI is not the only wolf to be concerned about!

Society is transforming through a whirlpool of innovations. This includes technological as well as social innovations, i.e. changes in social relations involving new ways of doing, organizing, framing and knowing. Especially the potentials for transformative social innovation (TSI) are gaining the interest of progressive political actors and critical scholars. Occurring in the form of new modes of governance and alternative ways of working and living together, TSI involves the challenging, altering or replacing of dominant institutions. As documented in various strands of critical social inquiry and innovation research, TSI praxis is pervaded with contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes. This methodological contribution addresses the challenge that tends to remain: How to elaborate this general critical awareness into more operational ‘strategies of inquiry’? The paper discusses paradoxes of a) system reproduction, b) temporality, and c) reality construction. Identifying distinct kinds of contradictions and distinct empirical phenomena, this differentiation also calls attention to the associated differences between realist, processual and constructivist research philosophies. Gathering the empirical analyses, theoretical interpretations and methodological advances that have been made on these paradoxes, this contribution opens up the scope for critical and practically relevant innovation research: It is important to bridge the divide between rigorous but sterile methodological know-how, and critical-reflexive theorizing that lacks operational insights.

Over the past two decades we have witnessed growing academic and policy interest in phenomena such as social innovation and social entrepreneurship. In these instances, the “social” element has often been described as a new or rediscovered category, indicating a normative predisposition to “elevate” existing or emerging innovation and entrepreneurship processes by identifying and promoting socially-acceptable standards of behavior and goal-setting. While previous reviews on social innovation have focused on the historical development of the concept and its role in academic debate, this article critically reviews the place of the “social” in current mainstream Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) studies. The aim is to understand how this literature has been evolving in relation to this element and to what extent this addition has promoted a radical shift in the research direction. Our review, based on selected articles from 16 I&E mainstream journals, advances a novel classification of the dominant approaches to the social dimension in I&E studies, identifying four main categories: disciplinary, integrationist, separationist, and essentialist. What emerges is that most I&E studies ignore, minimize, or compartmentalize the “social”, using it to extend existing frameworks rather than to evolve them. Indeed, while the “social” has been offering an avenue for critical views to challenge mainstream discourse, at present it does not seem to significantly affect the latter’s evolution.

This paper provides empirical research demonstrating that there are clear, consistent and repeatable processes at play in social innovation, calling into question the currently hegemonic postmodernist concept of ‘social bricolage’ in social innovation literature. The paper applies a critical realist & systems analysis approach, utilising Checkland’s (1981/2000) Soft Systems Methodology (SSM). The research project investigated 8 neighbourhood and community policing projects using a handbook called Locally identified Solutions & Practices (LISP). LISP was implemented in a range of different social contexts to construct context-mechanism-outcome (CMO) chains (after Pawson, 2013) in a two-step process to identify which social innovation mechanisms contributed to what outcomes in which contexts. The paper reports on empirically based evidence of social innovation processes that do not rely on the characteristics of the individual social entrepreneur or the serendipity of social bricolage ‘freeplay’ (Derrida, 1970). The paper makes the case that social innovation is more than ‘bricolage’ (Derrida, 1970; Di Domenico et al., 2010), not an eclectic mysterious craft of innovation that relies on the skills and characteristics of the social entrepreneur, but instead a systematic, consistent and repeatable process.

Critical studies of social innovation (SI) reveal sustainability concepts are widely used by scholars, policy makers and practitioners on a superficial level (Eichler & Schwarz, 2019). Even if SI is mainly linked to social and economic dimensions, the relationship between SI and environment is still vague and needs further research. One possible reason for this disconnectedness would be the dominating anthropocentric assumptions instead of ecocentric assumptions? To fill this gap, this paper aims to explore the conceptualization of nature in SI documents. We do this through an analysis of United Nations (UN) publications, particularly, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Accelerator Labs. In addition, we consider how SI is understood, executed, promoted and how perceptions of nature affect SI. Eco-critical discourse analysis (ECDA) is adopted as an analytical approach for this study. This study utilizes texts as empirical material on SI published by the UN. The focus on the UN is appropriate, as they are a highly influential institution on national economies in shaping their SI policies and practices. Therefore, this study is undertaken on the basis that the discourse of these documents affects the SI discourse and practices of countries and the field. The contribution of this study lies in its effort to reveal embedded propositions in SI texts through language-driven analysis, then to discuss how a deeper understanding would regain the agenda for long-lasting socio-economic problems through an ecocentric critical discourse.

This Thematic Issue seeks to explore critical perspectives of an international nature on social innovation (SI), social enterprise (SE) and/or social solidarity economy (SSE). The aim is to examine the grand narrative, explore the ontological assumptions of the field, challenge the normative and present alternatives that draw attention to political economy, critical theory and critical management studies. Critical perspectives emerged in social innovation (SI) literature as a concerted effort sometime in 2008. A few voices sounded from the edges of the field much earlier. Ash Amin, Professor of Geography at Durham University, inspected the new favourite of public policy way back in 2002, discarded it as a “a poor substitute for a welfare state” and never returned to the subject. There were heated debates that challenged the grand narrative of SI at the International Social Innovation Research Conferences (ISIRC) (once called the Social Enterprise Research Conference before becoming ISIRC with the involvement of the social innovation theme from Skoll Centre). The Voluntary Sector Studies Network (VSSN) conferences picked away at the promise of unlimited performance and achievement of the upstart SE in a mature voluntary and charity network (Aiken, 2002, 2006, 2007; Grenier, 2009; Pharaoh, Scott & Fisher, 2004). Still, on the whole, the literature in the last twenty years has been overwhelmingly interested in promoting social enterprise (SE) and SI as (a) an inherently good thing, (b) a solution to all problems and (c) a politically neutral complement to neo-liberal economics globally.

Users have no doubt become popular in innovation research. They are not considered a passive mass of adopters but as a more or less active agency in innovation processes. Diffusion research has, for instance, distinguished between several adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. These categories can be mapped on the diffusion s-curve and indicate a temporal order along which innovations may be analysed. However, early or late adopters were still seen primarily as adopters. Concepts such as “reinvention” or “domestication” then put more emphasis on the ways in which an innovation may be changed within the adoption process. In these cases, innovations came from elsewhere (i.e., manufacturers), but the users were credited with more creative potential than simply adopting novelties. The turn towards user-driven innovations decidedly shifted the creative potential towards (specific) user groups, transgressing the traditional distinction between producers and consumers. The involvement of users in innovation processes has been addressed under different labels, for instance, user innovation, open innovation, or participatory design and from different fields such as management and innovation research, science and technology studies, or social innovation studies. The main gist of these approaches lies in reclaiming hitherto neglected aspects, perspectives, or sources of innovations, thus arguing against a top-down producer-centred models of innovation by emphasising bottom-up user-centred modes of innovation. They reconfigure ideas about pushes and pulls, about the constellations and locales in which invention and diffusion occur, and about the transformations of innovations as they emerge and evolve over time and space. This thematic issue of NOvation seeks to shed light on this increasing popularity of “the user” in innovation studies. We gather here contributions from diverse backgrounds that critically focus on the role of users in innovation studies, from empowerment and emancipation to valorisation and exploitation. We especially addressed the questions of why users have become popular both empirically and conceptually across a range of fields and spanning from academia to politics and civil society. How does user-centred innovation relate to more traditional models of producer-centred innovation? Which role do critical users play in innovation research? Are there specific fields in which users are seen to be more active than in others? Especially, who is considered to be a user or customer?

Innovation Studies (IS) and Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) explored the role of users in socio-technological change: from their role as consumers, adopters or experimenters to maximize profit, to exploring the mutual shaping of users and technologies and the power relations embedded into the process of use. By the turn of the century, amidst broader claims to democratize Science and Technology, scholars and practitioners explored the ways technologies may contribute to overcome social, material, and political restrictions in structural inequality scenarios. While discursively praising user inclusion as a ‘good practice’, ‘technologies for inclusive development’ (TID) ranged from processes of distributed decision-making and empowerment to paternalistic schemes and unwanted effects that reinforce exclusion patterns. This paper aims to revisit user theories through the lens of inclusion/exclusion to explore user engagement in TID initiatives to understand the relation between user involvement and ‘inclusive’ outcomes. We argue that diverse theoretical views on user-centeredness, which we systematize in 5 types, are tied to different normative assumptions about what user-centeredness is for, with implications for technology practice and STS theory. In interaction between literature review and instrumental TID case studies (in water, health, nutrition, and recycling), we examine how these differences lead to differential outcomes in terms of inclusion (e.g., exclusion problem-solving, distribution of benefits, social learning). In turn, we analyze how bringing the inclusiveness/exclusion dimension may help to reveal user literature blind spots that need to be addressed, and how unveiling user theory may contribute to deepen our understanding of inclusion in technology making.

Innovation is becoming more and more participatory. Discourses insisting on the desirable involvement of users and lay citizens in innovation-making processes are burgeoning around the globe. This burgeoning is often fostered and supported by innovation scholars whose studies on, and calls for more open and participatory forms of innovation have recently gained traction among public authorities. However, as the appropriation of such scholarly work by public authorities is a recent phenomenon, much remains to be discovered about the interactions between participatory innovation models and the political contexts in which they emerge. In particular, this article offers an analysis of the relationships and allocation of power between the State and citizens that develop through participatory innovation policies. By developing a context-sensitive approach to study the case of Wallonia, one of the federal regions of Belgium, I analyze participatory innovation as a particular mode of government through which public authorities (re)invent themselves and the society they govern. I show that what matters for Walloon public authorities when they promote and set up participatory innovation practices is not only the results of such practices in terms of innovation products, but also and perhaps more importantly the shaping of entrepreneurial citizens as well as the Region that is expected to develop accordingly. Ultimately, this approach allows for critical scrutiny of the politics of innovation and the democratic order it contributes to produce in an economically peripheral region looking for quickly (re)developing itself in order to exist in the global economic competition.

Users play an increasingly important role in European innovation policy. They are commonly seen as drivers of and active co-creators within innovation processes. However, user-driven innovation remains infused with a number of assumptions about users, technology, and “successful” innovation, which (partly) undermine a more democratic, open approach to innovation. In this contribution, I investigate the interplay between broader policy assumptions in the European discourse on user-driven innovation and its practical performance within an innovation project centring on healthcare robotics. Here, I argue that the politics of user-driven innovation harbours particular assumptions that, in effect, restrict the agency of users while also engendering conflict and contradictory outcomes. Hence, user-driven innovation is not simply about users driving innovation but rather about interfacing users and their concerns with (robotics) developers and their technology. For this, I propose an analytics of interfacing, which draws together literatures on the performative dynamics of participatory processes and more recent work on the political economy of participation. Here, I contend that it is not enough to investigate the construction and performance of publics; rather, it is additionally necessary to follow the manifold practices by which those publics are rendered available for certain technological solutions – and vice versa. Such an analytical approach opens up a fruitful avenue to critically enquire into the politics of participation – sitting in between innovation policy and practice.

This paper develops hypotheses on the discovery of older people as "users" in the publicly funded development of digital technologies and underlying innovation policy motives. We then describe the effects of this innovation policy on the development of products and older people as their users in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). To this end, we reconstruct the involvement of users in two AAL funding programs, one at the European level and one at the national level (Germany). Based on this, we discuss the resulting consequences by describing how older people are configured as users in technology development with a focus on the concept of user-centered design (UCD) and what this configuration means for the developed technologies as well as for the older users. We describe how the participation of older people in technology development projects is a complex task that is not without controversy in social science research on user participation. We conclude by arguing for alternative technology development strategies and funding practices.

Within engineering, economics, and the natural sciences, sustainable aviation is often configured as an ecological and economic problem, which can be solved through technological innovation. In contrast to this, we set up a research project centering on social innovation, named Human demands of sustainable aviation. In the project, we combined theories from Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) with methods from Participatory Design (PD) and practice-based Ontological Design (OD). In this paper, we use our project as a case study to analyze and discuss how users and non-users are configured within different disciplinary contexts. The findings illustrate that conceptualizations and categorizations of users and non-users are not stable. They denote highly situated phenomena that emerge out of different research approaches and understandings of innovation. Power structures that are entangled with the positions researchers take, including specific theories, methods, and (implicit) values, pervade these contexts and understandings. With this in mind, we advocate for power-critical reflections on the performative effects of knowledge making as processes of world making and for inter- and transdisciplinary research to do justice to the different life worlds we inhabit. We further argue that innovation should be based on collectively negotiated visions of how we want to live in the future, instead of predictions that project our current realities into the status quo of tomorrow.

Private and organizational users are widely treated as equal in the literature on the integration of users in innovation projects. Based on a practice-theoretical perspective, we argue in this paper that this equation is inconsistent and inadequate. While users are conceptualized as competent and embedded when it comes to the genesis of their user knowledge, both factors are ignored when their involvement in the innovation process is considered. Drawing on empirical findings on interorganizational knowledge transfer, we show that the social, formal, and material embeddedness of organizational users crucially structures their integration. By elaborating the role of different structural dimensions in detail, we highlight the distinctive features of organizational users. In doing so, we further develop a heuristic that enables a detailed and adequate analysis of their integration.

Users have no doubt become popular in innovation research. They are not considered a passive mass of adopters but as a more or less active agency in innovation processes. Diffusion research has, for instance, distinguished between several adopter categories: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. These categories can be mapped on the diffusion s-curve and indicate a temporal order along which innovations may be analysed. However, early or late adopters were still seen primarily as adopters. Concepts such as “reinvention” or “domestication” then put more emphasis on the ways in which an innovation may be changed within the adoption process. In these cases, innovations came from elsewhere (i.e., manufacturers), but the users were credited with more creative potential than simply adopting novelties. The turn towards user-driven innovations decidedly shifted the creative potential towards (specific) user groups, transgressing the traditional distinction between producers and consumers. The involvement of users in innovation processes has been addressed under different labels, for instance, user innovation, open innovation, or participatory design and from different fields such as management and innovation research, science and technology studies, or social innovation studies. The main gist of these approaches lies in reclaiming hitherto neglected aspects, perspectives, or sources of innovations, thus arguing against a top-down producer-centred models of innovation by emphasising bottom-up user-centred modes of innovation. They reconfigure ideas about pushes and pulls, about the constellations and locales in which invention and diffusion occur, and about the transformations of innovations as they emerge and evolve over time and space. This thematic issue of NOvation seeks to shed light on this increasing popularity of “the user” in innovation studies. We gather here contributions from diverse backgrounds that critically focus on the role of users in innovation studies, from empowerment and emancipation to valorisation and exploitation. We especially addressed the questions of why users have become popular both empirically and conceptually across a range of fields and spanning from academia to politics and civil society. How does user-centred innovation relate to more traditional models of producer-centred innovation? Which role do critical users play in innovation research? Are there specific fields in which users are seen to be more active than in others? Especially, who is considered to be a user or customer?

This article examines the issue of responsible innovation in France. To describe its underlying mechanisms and logics, we retrace the advent of innovation in public policy and its reception in French firms, showing how responsible innovation has become the cornerstone of public-private interactions. The legal and administrative context of innovation in France, on the one hand, the emerging departments and managers of innovation in the large groups, on the other hand, participate in producing spaces where agents of the political and economic fields converge. Such situated interactions hinge on shared world views, values and tools. Innovation managers, executive directors of large firms, some French politicians and public servants seize upon responsible innovation and create areas regulated by specific norms and values. In these shared spaces, responsible innovation is the star object, the proxy for exchanges between the economic and the political fields.

This paper argues that responsible innovation discourses must consider the changing nature of digital innovation, if they are to stand a chance of steering the development of technology towards democratically-acceptable ends. It explores the extent to which foundational narratives of Responsible (Research and) Innovation (RRI) consider problematic features of metatechnologies – defined here as “core information technologies upon which others are based, and whose use vastly expands the degrees of freedom with which humans can act in the social and material worlds” – and implications for responsible innovation discourse in the digital age. The study finds that references underpinning paradigmatic RRI accounts include digital and metatechnology examples, albeit briefly in some cases, somewhat reinforcing the validity of seminal RRI accounts in the context of new and emerging digital technologies with metatechnological attributes. The need for additional reflection on the problematic implications of digital technologies for RRI is identified, for example with respect to distributed development, and recombinant and network-level effects. The paper concludes that the continuing value of RRI as a discourse to society will depend on researchers’ and practitioners’ awareness of the potential of these technologies for cascading, downstream innovation.

This article studies ways of dealing with the tension between a commitment to sustainable and responsible research and anticipated market requirements in the midstream of a research process in architecture and construction. Using a slightly modified version of Socio-Technical Integration Research (STIR), we explored the chances of questioning the primacy of the techno-economic innovation paradigm by deliberately provoking reflections through STIR interactions. Our research underlines the difficulties and limitations of challenging an orientation towards values of efficiency and productivity in favour of social and environmental values in the midstream of the research process and examines how the techno-economic innovation paradigm is able to insulate itself against critical questioning. It sheds light at the critical role of the underlying assumption that marketability of prospective outcomes is not one objective amongst others but the precondition for all others and at two argumentative patterns we termed the "lack-of-agency" and the "reconciliation-after-all" pattern.

The call for the development of more responsible research and innovation has increasingly permeated European Union research and development policies. Specifically, under the auspices of approaches such as “Responsible Research and Innovation” (RRI) and “Open Science”, these policies conceive of the need to make innovation dynamics radically open and debatable, even with regard to the underlying preferences and expectations shaping them. Responsibility has thus been conceived in eminently anticipatory terms, that is, in terms of collectively taking care in the present of the futures enabled through innovation practices. This normative conception, which emphasises the politicisation of the ways futures are constructed through innovation and goals they are oriented towards, is nonetheless realised within a context where the prevailing way of approaching the future with regard to innovation systems is highly committed to a capitalist imperative of technological progress and economic growth. This article argues that while anticipation – understood as an interventive practice – can deploy valuable responsibilisation heuristics, their degree of disruptiveness, or openness, may depend on how such interventive practice engaging with futures deals with this techno-economic commitment, or imperative.

Digitalization was supposed to be a transformation force for the academic publishing sector, but it has reinforced the oligopoly of for-profit academic publishers. Open access (OA) was also meant to counterbalance this situation, but after a decade of efforts it seems that it has not achieved their goals. This essay explores how the combination of digitalization and OA have contributed to reinforce the lock-in effects exerted in the sector by digital platforms operated by for-profit academic publishers. I also explore alternative paths for the development of OA with the theoretical lenses that provide responsible innovation, putting social emphasis at the politics and values that lie at the heart of academia. I argue that exploitation, appropriation of labor and quantification metrics widely present in this social domain must be counterbalanced with different actions that do not focus alone in making freely available scientific articles for citizens.

Commentators have bemoaned the absence of a clear conceptual understanding of innovation both generally and within responsible innovation (RI). Much of our thinking about innovation is fragmented into separate categories such as “business,” “social” or “technological” innovation with no clear understanding of the term these adjectives modify. In addition, RI discussions focus overwhelmingly on technological advances delivered through the marketplace, which are only a portion of the innovation story. Clearly, we need to develop a stronger account of the concept of innovation. What criteria must be satisfied for a contribution to the world to qualify as an innovation or, more simply, what is an innovation? This article will contend that innovation is inescapably normative, and that we can construct an understanding of innovation by elaborating on its normative elements and their implications. Innovation, I will propose, is ethical change that delivers substantial applied value to beneficiaries of a domain. After developing this account, I will show how it can reframe our understanding of innovation’s relationship with technology and the marketplace, the innovator’s understanding of technology, who gets to innovate, and why the various categories of innovation may be more diverting than helpful. I will also reflect on how the account of innovation offered here can refine our understanding of RI.

Global frameworks of RI face several challenges. These include (1) the extent to which economic interests can be reconciled with the concept of responsibility in innovation processes and (2) the lack of a strong political dimension in these frameworks’ conception of responsibility. Responding to these challenges is crucial if RI is to ensure that societal and natural needs are sufficiently considered in the innovation process. The influence of economic incentives on innovation processes coupled with the widespread depoliticization of persons makes it more urgent that RI adopt a political conception of responsibility in order to safeguard the legitimacy of the values and outcomes it deems societally desirable. This paper argues that the operative conception of responsibility in RI should be broadened to include a stronger political dimension. To this end, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt to continue rethinking the concept of “the political” and, by extension, how responsibility and politics can be understood as two sides of the same coin.

The concept of Responsible Innovation (RI) occupies a central place in the discourse on science and technology, especially in the context of the European Union (EU) but also within academia. This concept is guided by the idea of steering science and technology towards societally desirable outcomes, particularly in response to normative objectives such as Sustainable Development Goals. Visions of RI typically propose that to innovate responsibly requires a permanent commitment to be anticipatory, reflective, inclusively deliberative, and responsive. They also emphasize the need for open access, gender equality, science education, ethical standard in conducting experiments, and democratic governance. However, the societal purpose of RI fundamentally conflicts with the imperative of maximizing economic growth inherent in today’s innovation climate. This conflict points to a crisis in which innovation struggles to serve public interests insofar private interests continue to be prioritized. The magnitude of this crisis is also reflected within the RI literature itself, where the political ambition to exceed the privatization wave is summoned to a techno-economic concept of innovation. This issue of NOvation – Critical Studies of Innovation brings into question to what extent innovation necessarily relates to the market, whether it is possible to develop an alternative concept of innovation that is separated from economic ends, and how we can conceptualize, for example, a political understanding of innovation. What really is innovation? While all seven contributions share the aspiration to critically reflect on these questions, they each offer a distinct and original perspective in discussing the relation between innovation, technology, politics, economics, and responsibility.

In his book “Innovation, Ethics and Our Common Futures: A Collaborative Philosophy,” Rafael Ziegler sets out to critically assess the notion of innovation as a driving force in modern-day (Western) economies. He asserts that ‘innovation as technological novelty for commercial use is driving us deeper in unsustainability’ (p. v), and embarks on a philosophical journey to scrutinize the concept of innovation and its role in modern economies. In doing so, Ziegler aims to develop a sufficientarian notion of innovation, calling to embrace a broad, collaborative understanding of innovation based on pluralistic modes of provision focusing not only on markets and increasing financial welfare, but instead on nature-respecting sufficientarian principles of enough is enough – ‘within justice of a minimum threshold and of respect for upper limits to resource use’ (p. 18).

Innovation is an old word, of Greek origin, that came into the Latin vocabulary in the early Middle Age and into our everyday vocabulary with the Reformation. However, it is only during the second half of the twentieth century that innovation became a fashionable concept and turned into a buzzword. It gave rise to a plethora of terms like technological innovation, organizational innovation, industrial innovation and, more recently, social innovation, open innovation, sustainable innovation, responsible innovation. We may call these terms X-innovation. In this way, X-innovation is the latest step to give sense to a century-old process of enlargement of the concept of innovation. Over the last five centuries, innovation enlarged its meaning from the religious to the political to the social to the economical. X-innovation is the more recent such enlargement. It Is the continuation, under new terms, of the contestation of technological innovation as the dominant discourse of the twentieth century. How can we make sense of this semantic extension? Why do these terms come into being? What drives people to coin new terms? What effects do the terms have on thought, on culture and scholarship and on policy and politics? Which forms of contestation and appropriation ensue around certain X-innovations? How do they shape, and are shaped by, broader social trends? How to they relate to questions of power and inclusion?

Innovation is an old word, of Greek origin, that came into the Latin vocabulary in the early Middle Age and into our everyday vocabulary with the Reformation. However, it is only during the second half of the twentieth century that innovation became a fashionable concept and turned into a buzzword. It gave rise to a plethora of terms like technological innovation, organizational innovation, industrial innovation and, more recently, social innovation, open innovation, sustainable innovation, responsible innovation. We may call these terms X-innovation. In this way, X-innovation is the latest step to give sense to a century-old process of enlargement of the concept of innovation. Over the last five centuries, innovation enlarged its meaning from the religious to the political to the social to the economical. X-innovation is the more recent such enlargement. It Is the continuation, under new terms, of the contestation of technological innovation as the dominant discourse of the twentieth century. How can we make sense of this semantic extension? Why do these terms come into being? What drives people to coin new terms? What effects do the terms have on thought, on culture and scholarship and on policy and politics? Which forms of contestation and appropriation ensue around certain X-innovations? How do they shape, and are shaped by, broader social trends? How to they relate to questions of power and inclusion?

From its obscure origins in management theory, disruptive innovation has become one of the concepts used to describe how networked digital technologies and platforms transform industries and institutions. In this paper, I will examine how contested, and at times incommensurable, iterations of disruptive innovation share a similar idea of technology. Drawing upon discourses of disruptive innovation from management theory, institutional policies, and popular culture reveals a shared idea of technology whose characteristics include a reified idea of technology and a horizon of expectations in which fear of falling behind influences ideas about technological change.

The paper addresses social innovation both as a mode and as a means of social change. It draws on the recent developments in the sociology of repair to offer a critical reading of pro-innovation discourse on the level of EU policy. It is argued that the practices and concepts of social innovation on the level of EU policy can be fruitfully reframed within a repair narrative, whereas the proliferation of the buzzword social innovation warrants a closer look from an innovation studies perspective. Connecting both repair and innovation studies thus offers a more nuanced understanding of current societal transformations and adds to the conceptual discussion of social change and social order.

From the 1970s onwards, changes in economic theory began to draw attention to the relationship between economic growth and technological innovation. Technological innovation has come to be considered fundamental to boosting international trade, increasing productivity and generating more and better jobs, among other benefits. However, more recent academic narratives began to change through considering the importance of technological innovation for social purposes such as social inclusion and sustainable development. This recovered the concept of social innovation and alongside the development of a plethora of alternative innovation concepts – such as sustainable innovation, open innovation, responsible innovation, green innovation, among other “x-innovation” concepts (Gaglio et al. 2017). Nevertheless, little is known about the extent to which these counterhegemonic concepts emerge and feature in Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) policy discourses. In this sense, this article aims to understand the use of “x-innovation” concepts and the role attributed to innovation for (allegedly) counterhegemonic purposes in the STI national policies of Iberoamerican countries within the framework of disclosing the specificity of this discourse.

From the late 1990s, many national policies for research and development (R&D), focusing on innovation, were established in South Korea. In May 2015, the Korean government announced another bold blueprint for R&D innovation emphasizing a serious approach toward overcoming outdated ideas and practices regarding the governance of the science and technology sectors. This emphasized very high expectations for the country, though in the end it brought brutal criticism and bitter disappointment. This paper conducts a critical analysis of the discourse surrounding the notion of national R&D innovation by focusing on the case of the 2015 Government R&D Innovation Plan. Various (un)published papers were examined as mediators to reproduce, construct, and deliver a particular imagination. By analyzing not only the final policy documents but also the initial policy draft, this paper highlights a substantive discontinuity in the formation of the 2015 Government R&D Innovation Plan that illuminates different imaginations of so-called national innovation in terms of R&D. It illustrates a tension occurring in national R&D innovation in South Korea between the desire to reproduce past glory by following previous experiences and a willingness to embody semantic meanings of innovation with novel approaches. This paper reveals a discursive oscillation of imaginations in national R&D innovation which resulted in its conceptual and practical ambiguity.

After the publication of the fourth (2018) edition of the Oslo Manual, a key methodological reference for producing innovation statistics at international level, a review of the definitions of innovation – or, better, business innovation – used by the community of official statisticians has to be recommended. The main reason for such a review is the need to assess to what extent the current Oslo Manual has benefited from the rich economic and management literature on firms’ innovation produced since the publication of the previous edition in 2005. It should also be pointed out that the current Manual was expected to fix some long-standing issues like that of properly accommodating service innovation in a statistical framework constantly biased towards innovation in tangible goods and technology-related phenomena. This article argues that these challenges have been only partially met. By reviving some concepts used in the past, such as the object-oriented approach to measure innovation, and being especially concerned to make the statistical framework designed to measure business innovation applicable in other sectors of the economy (including individuals and households), some specific features of the business innovation processes may have been neglected. The Manual discusses a wide array of issues regarding the economics of innovation and management practices, however it does not define a new consistent framework able to accommodate the demand for indicators about the influence on business innovation of the ongoing processes of digitalization, servitization or open innovation and, at least partially, to adopt a service-dominant logic.

On September 15th till 17th 2021, scholars from all over the world met digitally to critically discuss various aspects of innovation, innovation research and innovation governance. The online forum was built up around three keynote speeches, a method lab led by Philippe Zittoun, and a paper and a theory lab, in which researchers presented their own research. The overarching theme of the online forum was Governance(s) of Innovation, which was discussed from various angles.

The international journal NOvation: Critical Studies of Innovation was launched to contribute to the rethinking and debunking of innovation narratives in STS (Science, Technology and Society) and STI (Science, Technology, and Innovation). There is a need to critically examine studies of innovation and obtain a clearer portrait of innovation than the depiction this field has been accustomed to. The journal questions the current narratives of innovation and offers a forum for discussion of some different interpretations of innovation, not only its virtues, but also its implications. In this sense, NO refers to non-innovative behaviors, which are as important to our societies as innovation is. Failures, imitation and negative effects of innovation, to take just some examples of non-innovation or NOvation, are scarcely considered and rarely form part of theories of innovation.