Special issue on “Cultural and cognitive dimensions of innovation” edited by Petra Ahrweiler and Riccardo Viale

Abstract

The reasons that drive individuals to develop new technologies and to disseminate them in new products and processes, and the capacity to develop original solutions to technological problems, can be analysed with the concepts typical of individual and social cognitive psychology. Various aspects of cognitive activity address innovation. In particular, the capacity to grasp the latent questions and needs of the market that lies behind the possibility to identify opportunities for new products or services; the means of generating solutions that can respond effectively to the realisation of these new opportunities; problem solving processes in the identification of new procedures that underpin process inventions and new manufacturing techniques; the risk of innovative behaviour and the contexts that can favour a greater or lesser propensity to develop innovative solutions. The best historical example of the two stages of the identification of the problem/opportunity and the generation of a solution is that of Jozsef Biro, the inventor of the ballpoint pen. As a journalist, he considered the fountain pens of the early twentieth century inadequate for his work. As he watched some children in Buenos Aires playing with marbles on the wet tarmac, he noticed that these left a trail on the ground as they rolled. Reasoning by analogy, he had the idea of a sphere that could guide the ink inside a pen. He patented the idea, which was developed and led to the creation of the ballpoint pen. Individual and social cognitive psychology is able to study the various stages of an innovative process. Creativity and problem solving are not the only possible subjects of cognitive analysis, so is the more socio-economic dimension, like the reasons that make a new product an innovation, because they manage to satisfy latent needs; the cognitive mechanisms of comprehension, acceptance and choice of a new product; the propensity to innovate, seen in the light of the representation of the risk and the decision-making activity of the innovating agent, etc. The dynamics of innovation can be explained through the reasoning,