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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Korean government announced another bold blueprint for R&D innovation emphasizing a serious approach toward overcoming outdated ideas and practices regarding the governance of the science and technology sectors.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.

Na efervescência da valorização do indivíduo, o desenvolvimento econômico tem sido associado à contribuição da criatividade nas organizações. Algumas técnicas de processos criativos se evidenciam como facilitadoras no âmbito organizacional. Neste contexto, o artigo tem como objetivo apresentar técnicas de criatividade utilizadas no meio organizacional para desenvolvimento de ideias. Para atender a esse objetivo, adotou-se o método exploratório e descritivo e como procedimento técnico optou-se pela realização de uma pesquisa bibliográfica. Como resultado evidenciou-se a importância do ser humano como ator principal nos processos criativos, e percebeu-se que sem o envolvimento das pessoas, as técnicas não geram resultados per se.

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.