Footnote:
In: P. Kawalec, R. Wierzchosławski (eds.), Social responsibility and science in innovation economy, Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL 2015, p. 335-352
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments July 2015 erstellt
Description:
The paper addresses one of the challenges to the concept of innovation articulated recently by V. Blok and P. Lemmens (2015). The traditional understanding of innovation has been predominantly profit-driven (‘economized’) (Solow 1956; Griliches 1957, 1960; Arrow 1962; Antonelli 2008; Godin 2008; Greenhalgh and Rogers 2010). In view of the recognition of the market failure problems (Arrow 1962; OECD 2011), new approaches to understanding of innovation have been offered, in particular ‘responsible innovations’ (European Commission 2013; Owen et al. 2013; van den Hoven et al. 2014, 2015). Nonetheless, this approach apparently inherits the same economized concept of innovation as the traditional one (Blok and Lemmens 2015; Rimes et al. 2014). To come to terms with the economization and its consequences a more thoroughgoing revision of the concept of innovation is presumably called for. The paper propounds this kind of revision as implied by a value-based view (Molina 2014) of the entire research process resulting in innovations. It is argued that from the earlier stages of the research process innovations inherit an ambivalued characteristics: Constant Cultural Value (CCV) and Variable Utility Value (VUV), corresponding to different dimensions of knowledge and scope of manipulated objects involved. The distinction of the two kinds of values inherent in all stages of research and also in innovations articulates the wide-spread recognition of this two-dimensional character of innovations, as reflected for instance in the exploitation vs. exploration dilemma in organizational studies (Benner and Tushman 2003). The idea of the constant cultural value strengthens the rationale for public interventions in addressing innovation market failures as illustrated with a recent application of EU innovative public procurement instrument. The paper derives also the consequences of the ambivalued concept of innovation for methodology of innovation studies. Given the recent advances in methodology of interdisciplinary studies (John W. Creswell et al. 2011; J. W. Creswell 2008; O’Brien et al. 2013; Tashakkori and Teddlie 2010; Teddlie and Tashakkori 2006, 2009, 2012), it would seem that the most natural choice for innovation studies would be mixed-methods design (Kawalec 2014a, 2014b). However, as I argue in this paper, it would not capture adequately the ambivalued nature of the concept of innovation. Hence, an original methodology is proposed, which modifies the mixed-methods approach to form interactive innovation research design. The idea of interactive research design is illustrated in detail with a recent innovation study