Innovation, society and complexity: a dynamics of detecting, solving and creating problems

An INSITE workshop

As a part of the EU Coordination Action INSITE, a workshop will be held March 21-23 2012 at the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT – www.ecltech.org) in Venice. The theme is “Innovation, society and complexity: a dynamics of detecting, solving and creating problems”, and we want to introduce and discuss a variety of approaches with the aim of discovering new ways to construct models and theory for understanding innovation.
Following Schumpeter’s original definition, innovation is typically seen as the process by which inventions are taken up and put to use by humans and their organizations. Innovation is simply our ability to adapt and seen that way it is hard to think of anything that would be more centrally important to the fate of our societies. Through innovation, humans not only adapt to pre-existing environmental states but also construct entirely new environments, with their own set of novel challenges. This process is however not easily understood. It is a mass dynamics where myriad microscopic and local events intermesh and feedback on one another. As inventions are put to use, get combined and re-applied, for real and in the minds of agents, new opportunities and problems appear. This brings forth new inventions, and it shifts the fortunes for artifacts and agents already in the system. In short terms, innovation doesn’t just solve problems; it also creates problems as it goes along, not unlike organic evolution in ecosystems.
Our standard linear conception of causation serves us poorly when we consider a mass dynamics, and not least one of this magnitude, so we need to somehow narrativize this mass dynamics so that it becomes compatible with our (for the purposes) poorly adapted cognitive tools. We don’t want to state the goal of a “general theory of innovation” but note instead the necessity (at least for the time being) of revealing different facets of innovation by viewing it from different directions and through different lenses. What a synthesis between such perspectives would look like, and indeed if one is possible or even desirable, is an important meta-issue to be illuminated at the workshop.
The goal of the INSITE project is to bootstrap an effort to understand the sustainability of the innovation society and in the extension improve our abilities to design and “emerge” institutions that improve sustainability. A complex system comes with no guarantees for what concerns the services or dis-services that it provides, and past performance may say nothing about future performance. Given that the process by which we solve problems is the process by which we create problems, can we expect the innovation society to solve its own problems? Can we come up with new ways to monitor, evaluate and react to problems and opportunities on the horizon? Can we gain insight more generally into how societies work and what options we have for governing them?
The workshop also serves the purpose of communicating what the INSITE project is about and as an invitation to participate in its activities.
Some issues that the speakers and discussants are asked to consider are:
•    Empirical measurement and analysis: how can innovation dynamics be analyzed empirically? Types of data, case studies and so on.
•    Experiments: how can innovation be studied by means of experiments? Real-world experiments, games and so on.
•    Control, policy, visions: what about controlling innovation dynamics, policy issues and envisioning the future? What is needed, desired, possible or problematic?
•    Theory structure: do we seek a general theory or something else? Is a general theory just a pipe dream or can it play a role? Do we need a plurality of perspectives, and if so how can their contributions be understood coherently? What types of models do we need and what for? Cognitive models?
Invited speakers
The idea is to illuminate the modeling problem from as many angles as possible and the talks aim to represent a particular take on the problem.
•    Koen Frenken, Eindhoven U. of Tech., This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Frank Geels, University of Sussex, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Lars Jadelius, Chalmers, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Marco Janssen, Arizona State University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Jeff Johnson, Open University, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Kevin Laland, University of St. Andrews, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    David A. Lane, ECLT, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Kristian Lindgren, Chalmers, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    John Levi Martin, U. of Chicago, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Dwight W. Read, UCLA, USA., This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    William Wimsatt, UC Davis, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
•    Claes Andersson, Chalmers, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it


Schedule

The sessions are 40 minutes of presentation followed by 30 minutes of discussion. The hope is that the discussion will be structured by issues that have turned up during the workshop. Of course, the topics of the talks are highly likely to turn up.