A conceptual history of innovation

Benoît Godin

Chapter 2 in The Elgar Companion to Innovation and Knowledge Creation, 2017, pp 25-32 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Innovation is a concept that everyone understands spontaneously, or thinks they understand; that every theorist talks about and every government espouses. Yet, it has not always been so. For the last five hundred years, the concept innovation has been a dirty word. The history of the concept of innovation is an untold story. It is a story of myths and conceptual confusions. In this chapter, I study the ways in which thoughts on innovation of early modern society gave rise to innovation theory in the twentieth century. Namely, how, when and why a pejorative and morally connoted word shifted to a much-valued concept. I offer a history of the concept of innovation, going back to antiquity. A history that takes the use of the concept seriously: from polemical to instrumental to theoretical.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Geography; Innovations and Technology (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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