Coordination Action funded under the FP7- ICT- FET Open call

Duration: 1st march 2011 – 28th February 2014 (36 months)

The main objective of INSITE is to assemble a community of researchers and practitioners to engage in constructing a research and action agenda based upon a new unified approach to three grand themes, all fundamental in current discourse about our society and where it might be heading: innovation, sustainability and ICT. The key concepts that underlie INSITE have to do with the relationship among these three themes. In this document, we first pose three questions around which project activities will revolve, and we then describe three key concepts the elaboration of which will inform these activities.

The Innovation Society: Three Questions

Human societies have always innovated, in the sense of constructing new artifacts and organizational forms to address perceived challenges to and opportunities arising from their current way of life. But for most of human history, innovation tended to be an activity of last resort, regarded primarily as a way of preserving things as they were from some sort of external threat, or exploiting existing competences to gain advantages over some (natural or social) “other”. Novelty in itself was not viewed positively; and possessing things, while often important in marking fundamental social distinctions, had in general a negative moral valence as an end in itself or a marker of individual identity.

All this began to change in the 18th century. Over the following two centuries, the number of artifacts, both types and tokens, increased dramatically, as did the complexity of the organizations that produced and exchanged artifacts, the uses to which artifacts were put, and the patterns of interaction among people around these uses. Moreover, in the 20th century, new kinds of organizations came into being dedicated to inventing new functionalities for artifacts (e.g. the marketing profession), designing artifacts that instantiated this new functionality (e.g. various engineering disciplines), and convincing potential users that these functionalities promised value for them, even satisfied needs they heretofore hadn’t conceived, never mind felt (e.g. the advertising industry). Novelty became a fundamental social value, and the ownership of artifacts the primary basis of individual identity.

Within the richest societies, a new form of innovation dependence arose and established itself. This dependence was tied to a particular way of viewing the socio-technological world. According to this view, the principal, indeed overriding, policy aim for local, regional and national government is sustained economic growth. The engine of this growth is innovation, the creation of new kinds of artifacts. Which kinds of new artifacts have value is determined by the market; while governments may provide incentives for innovation, and may try to steer research and development into projects designed to explore potentially socially useful directions, in the end innovation policies are regarded as successful only to the extent that they lead to new artifacts produced and sold by profit-seeking private firms, to buyers convinced that these artifacts have sufficient value to justify their market price. The cost of not innovating – or of subordinating innovation to other values, from cultural enrichment to social justice – is generally regarded as prohibitively high: competition at the level of firms and of national economies doom dawdlers to failure and descent into economic decline and social chaos.

Over the last two decades, in the richest countries, this innovation-dependent view increasingly informs the content and boundaries of policy debate at the governmental level, strategic direction at the firm level, and the way in which individual citizens interpret the economic and political contexts that structure their lives. Collectively, the citizens of these countries and their way of life, including the social, economic and cultural institutions that sustain it, constitute the innovation society.

Over the past several years, the innovation society has run up against some serious obstacles: the financial crisis, the specter of global environmental change and resource exhaustion, and increasing resistance from individuals, groups and societies that reject the belief and values on which it is based. The root of all these problems is the same, and it lies in the dynamics of innovation processes as they are currently constructed. Cascades of innovation take the innovation society on rides in directions that nobody intended beforehand and that are very hard to adjust en route. These cascades combine force with a lack of control in a way that is unsettling even when the effects seem mostly positive, but can be disastrous when their destructive potentials dominate. Examples from the near past include the failure to anticipate the current macroeconomic turmoil coming in the wake of a wave of innovation in derivative-based financial instruments and practices based upon them; the inter-relatedness of drivers of climate change, terrorism and political instability; the explosion of costs and potential failure in the organization of healthcare delivery; the increasing divide between rich and poor, included and excluded, both within the innovation society itself and between that society and the rest of the world. We see it as obvious that the societal expressions of innovation are anything but uncomplicated one-off events, determined by known factors and leading to intended effects. Clouds of externalities – unintended causes and effects – constitute the dark matter that we must penetrate if we are to understand the dynamics of innovation in society. The faster the innovation society changes, the more interconnected it becomes, the greater the likelihood of concatenations of such unintended consequences and the potentially grave risks that they carry. For our future as a species, and that of our society, a much better insight into the relationship between innovation, unintended consequences and sustainability is therefore essential.

The project’s activities will revolve around the following four sets of questions about the innovation society:

The dynamics of innovation in society How does innovation work? How do new things lead to other new things on the micro level and what are the emergent effects of such dynamics? Can innovation be modeled?

Is the innovation society sustainable? Can we improve our understanding of the relationship between innovation and unintended consequences? If so, can society generate innovation processes that tackle their own unwanted externalities? If the innovation society is not sustainable, are there alternatives that might result in a sustainable, economically viable society, consistent with such basic European values as individual liberty, democratic governance, and social justice?

Innovation and policy How can innovation be focused and harnessed? Can its direction be provided by civil society, rather than the market? What can and can we not aim for and predict about innovation processes? Can bottom-up strategies for innovation be designed that combine some measure of societal control with flexibility? What role can ICT play in such strategies?