Innovation and Sustainability

Abstract

Our society is increasingly beset by what it interprets as global crises, of which the financial crisis, the energy crisis, and the global warming crisis are leading examples. All these crises share a common origin in what may be described as a social meta-crisis, induced by the way in which our society organizes its processes of innovation. We contend that this meta-crisis (and hence also the component crises it spawns) will be extremely difficult to resolve via the economic and political processes our society has come to rely on to confront challenges. To describe the meta-crisis, we begin by introducing some ideas on innovation dynamics, which will allow us to formulate the nature of the meta-crisis and the reason for which we need to develop new processes to deal with it. These ideas were initially developed in the FET-sponsored ISCOM (Innovation Society as a Complex System) project and are currently the focus of the FET Coordination Action INSITE (Innovation, Sustainability and ICT). 1 By innovation, we refer to the processes through which new artifacts are conceived, designed, produced and integrated into patterns of use. These processes necessarily involve the construction of new patterns of interaction among agents, and hence transformations in the organization of what we may call agent space. Thus there is an inextricable linkage between the dynamics of change in the space of artifacts and in the space of agents (Lane and Maxfield, 2005). These dynamics are mediated by the way in which the relevant agents represent the contexts in which they act: in particular, their attributions about the identity of the other agents with whom they interact and the functionality of the artifacts around which their interactions are organized. The incorporation of artifacts instantiating these new attributions of functionality into patterns of use by agents can lead to new values and, eventually, new needs on the part of these agents. Innovations occur in cascades, which link the generation of new artifact types, organizational transformations and new attributions of functionality. Moreover, these cascades are frequently driven by a positive feedback dynamic, which works like this (Lane, Maxfield, Read and van der Leeuw, 2009): (1) new artifact types are designed to achieve some particular attribution of functionality; (2) organizational transformations are constructed to proliferate the use of tokens of the new type; (3) novel patterns of human interaction emerge around these artifacts in use; (4) new attributions of functionality are generated to describe that the participants in these interactions are obtaining or might obtain from them; (5 = 1) new artifacts are designed to instantiate the new attributed functionality. The cascades that result from this positive feedback dynamic, characterized as they are by the generation of new attributions and the emergence of new patterns of agent interaction, are anything but linear and predictable.. Over the last century, positive feedback innovation dynamics have become ever more important in the organization and collective imagination of Western society. New organizational forms have emerged, whose principal functionality is to implement each step in the exaptive bootstrapping dynamic. For example, over the past 140 years, a plethora of engineering professions have arisen that support the training of, provide collective memory for, and establish communication networks among, people whose work consists of designing artifacts to deliver a specified functionality (step 1 above). Many of these engineers are employed in industrial and state-sponsored RD over the past half-century, and in particular the last two decades, their work is increasingly enabled by research that derives from new forms of formal and informal industrial-university partnership. Passing to step 2, the advertising industry over the last century has played a key role in translating new attributions of functionality into new needs, which over the last several decades are increasingly centered not on physical or biological requirements for sustenance, shelter or comfort, but on artifact-mediated attributions of individual and social identity. And the marketing profession over the last 50 years or so has developed increasingly sensitive instruments for uncovering new uses for existing artifacts (step 3), converting them into new attributions of functionality, and discovering agents who might conceivably come to engage in patterns of interaction with artifacts and other agents in which these new functionalities will provide them with the