Innovation and sustainability

David Lane presentation about Innovation and sustainability

Transcript

1. Innovation cascades • New kinds of artifacts • Transformations in patterns of social interaction (social organization) • New attributions of – Identity • Agents: what they do, how they do it • Artifacts: how they are made; how they are used, by whom – value
2. The rise (and fall) of the “Italian” ottavo in the 16th century grafico 5 IL LIBRO VENEZIANO: il formato e il volgare 0,0 5,0 10,0 15,0 20,0 25,0 30,0 35,0 40,0 45,0 1500-10 1511-20 1521-30 1531-40 1541-50 1551-60 1561-70 1571-80 1581-90 1591-1600 % FOL. Ita FOL. Lat 4° Ita 4° Lat 8° Ita 8° Lat 12° Ita
3. The Aldine Le Cose Volgare di Messer Francesco Petrarcha, 1501 • Redirection: reading as recreation • Reading what, how? • Some novelties: – Ottavo – Italics (Griffo) – Introduction + text, no comments – Punctuation: comma, period, apostrophe; non- Latinized spelling – Bembo’s Italian philology and the birth of a (dead) language Prose della volgar lingua, 1525
4. Some sites along the cascade • Ottavo italics bfc, failed monopoly • New format -> new public -> new contents (eg secrets, letters, almanacs) -> new roles (eg “poligrafi”, peddlars, book smugglers) • Debate on the identity of the Italian language (Castiglione and Machiavelli vs. Bembo); Aretino and a living language • The fall of the Italian ottavo: delocalization and the Counter-reformation
5. Positive feedback dynamics: exaptive bootstrapping – New artifact types designed to instantiate a particular attribution of functionality – Organizational transformations constructed to proliferate use of tokens of new type – Novel patterns of human interaction emerge around these artifacts in use – New attributions of functionality generated
6. Organizing an innovation society – New artifact types designed to instantiate a particular attribution of functionality Engineering profession; R&D labs; industrial- university partnerships – Organizational transformations constructed to proliferate use of tokens of new type Advertising industry – Novel patterns of human interaction emerge around these artifacts in use – New attributions of functionality generated Marketing profession
7. Antidepressants • 1950’s: Scientific medicine and the pharmaceutical industry antibiotics, clinical trials • Scientific psychiatry?? – Tranquillizers and psychic enhancers – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (1st ed 1952 130 pages, 106 disorders; 4th ed 1994 886 pages, 297 disorders; from etiologic and psychodynamical to behavioral) • Depression -- self-limiting, rare 1 in 40,000 • Neurotransmitters and the broken brain
8. The drug-disease cascade • Rational drug design • New drugs to new diseases • The depression(s) epidemic – Diagnosis DSM checklist, GPs – US: 1 in 10, major cause of work disability – From acute and self-limiting to chronic and progressive • Do the drugs cause the disease??
9. Innovation society ideology • The principal policy aim: sustained economic growth, interpreted as a steady increase in GDP • The engine of this growth: innovation, the creation of new kinds of artifacts. • Which new kinds of artifacts have value is decided by the market • The price to pay for not innovating or for subordinating innovation to other values, like cultural enrichment or social justice: – competition at the level of firms and of national economies doom dawdlers to failure – descent into economic decline and social chaos.
10. Is the Innovation Society Sustainable? • Endogenous social-environmental crises • With impacts on increasing spatial and decreasing temporal scales
11. Innovation policy • In the Innovation Society: priming the pump of invention; leaving innovation to “the market” • Alternatives? – systemic innovation policy mobilizing civil society – distributed innovation policy scaffolding structures to facilitate social innovation networks and projects