Let's innovate! but for what value(s)? Towards an economic geography of valuation in markets and society

Abstract

In an endeavor to comprehend the socio-economic origins of the value added created within and between territories, economic geography has tended to overlook how value is itself socio-economically constructed in space. I claim, in line with economic sociology and pragmatist market theories, that the socio-economic construction of value should be at the core of our contemporary understanding of innovation to address not merely the economic issues of globalization, but also the grand societal challenges we face today. Value creation should not be regarded as a consequential output of production and innovation organized across space, but as an ongoing process of social, economic and technical co-construction that is contingent on both time and space. This is not to say that one should abandon research on innovation in economic geography, but rather that it should be approached as a question of valuation. In this approach, value creation is not the consequence of innovation, but the process and the result of socially undertaken changes that are co-existential with innovation around two interdependent issues: innovation as relational and transactional valuation in markets and as institutional and political valuation in society. This research should also be future-oriented and should reposition materiality at its center.