The Quest for Innovation and Cultures of Technology

THE FUTURE OF THE PAST

While today the future appears to be highly uncertain and fragile, exacerbated by the process of globalization and, more recently, the fear of global terrorism, some fifty years ago, the view of the future was very different.1 Looking back may throw light on what has changed. Perhaps no other book is as compelling a witness as The Limits to Growth (Meadows 1972), published under the auspices of the Club of Rome. This ambitious research project triggered an unprecedented worldwide response since it was the first computer-based world model with normative assumptions, which had emerged from the young field of dynamic systems modeling. Some interpreted it as a courageous attempt to confront all of the pressing problems of the world in a holistic way, while others, especially the economists, were more skeptical in their endorsement. The book represented a thinly disguised attack on one of the era’s hitherto unquestioned ideological dogmas: continued economic growth without considering its negative effects on the natural environment. It deployed computational simulation models to warn about the environmental and demographic consequences if undifferentiated, and unimpeded economic growth was to continue. The various crisis scenarios that the model produced demanded urgent action and a reversal of dominant thinking (Nowotny 2002). One of the more lasting legacies of The Limits to Growth has been an altered sense of the future and of ways of coping with its inherent fragility. Part of the persuasiveness of the world models of J.W. Forrester and D. L. Meadows resulted from the widely shared belief that the future was considered predictable – embodied in a computer model that foretold what would happen, if we do not change our behavior.

Today’s sense of the future could not be more different. It is spoken about in the conditional and should be referred to exclusively as a plural. Various kinds of risks have become an integral part of our lives, replacing the fear of the one big catastrophe in the 1970s: the collapse of the environment. Even the latest spread of fears – fear of terrorism – fits into this overall picture. The future has therefore moved closer to the present. Concomitantly, the tools to imagine the future in a more systematic way have also evolved. Models are recognized as being provisional. The process of thinking through, and reflecting upon one’s built-in assumptions has become far more important than the actual findings. In using the various tools of forecasting or backcasting, future scanning or devising road maps, creating visions or celebrating the creative forces of chaos, flexibility and creativity have become the hallmarks of this process. In this rhetoric the process mirrors a predominant mechanism: the market. But it has also become clear that, above all, the future is inherently uncertain.

In retrospect, the three golden decades of the last part of the twentieth century seem to be far more removed than mere chronology would indicate, firmly rooted in the centralized structures of the welfare state. Even the slightest achievements of this bygone age were translated into a rich but rigid arrangement of policies and regulations. This was stimulated by the belief, at least in some countries in Europe, that planning was not only possible, but also a sign of good government. Looking back from today’s vantage point, where governing has yielded to governance and statecraft has been taken over by stagecraft (Ezrahi 2003), it comes as a shock to perceive what is missing in the way we perceive the future. It is not so much the technocratic streak that colored the world models and other predictions of the future as it was the lack of other perspectives. What is markedly absent when looking back today is the multitude of citizens and consumers who constitute democratic plurality. Today we would ask: how can one conceive of the future without taking into account the views of the future held by all of these actors who are supposed to shape it?

The links between the present and the unknown future have always been a source of fascination, each culture and each historical epoch, has structured them in diverse ways. The urge to divine what was to come, lay at the roots of the ancient Chinese arts of numbers and mathematics. Christian theology pictured a future based upon the belief in salvation. And, for probably most of our history, fate reigned supreme in many societies. Today, our public belief is that innovation enables us to negotiate the future, after having had to accept that there are limits to planning. Innovation embraces the uncertainties inherent in the future – and attempts to seize whatever opportunities they have to offer. The meaning of the concept of innovation has changed. While the configuration of known elements is still at its core, it also transcends what is known in a radical, evolutionary sense.

Why has the quest for innovation become so omnipresent at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When and how did the collective obsession with innovation arise? Even the quest for discoveries, whose significance as an indispensable epistemic base is sometimes realized only much later, is now moving closer to possible technological applications. Most scientists are aware of the fact that they are also expected to seek possible ways of “translating” their basic findings and discoveries in a way that will be useful to society in one way or another.

The current emphasis on innovation does not mean that this is a new phenomenon, nor that innovation was not seen as highly desirable and crucial for economic growth before. But – to mention one example – innovative processes are understood as endogenous phenomena in orthodox neoclassical economic theory. To this day, J. A. Schumpeter’s proposals for an economic theory of innovation remain outside mainstream economic thought. Economists who took them as a starting point, depart critically from neoclassical theory. Empirically speaking, processes of innovation are the result of specific activities aimed at changing the production process, introducing new products or using different modes of financing. The whole problem lies in the unpredictability of the success of attempts at innovation in respect to other actors and the uncertainty of the utility of the innovation. As Schumpeter argued, entrepreneurs are indeed interested in profit, but innovation cannot be understood as motivated by goal-oriented utility maximizing alone (Schumpeter 1934; Beckert 2002).

One theme I want to propose here is that the quest for innovation fills a conceptual void in our collective imagining of the future. Our thinking about the future is itself historically constrained. It has moved precariously between some degree of stability and a principled openness to the unforeseen. It has become subject to an evolutionary perspective, oscillating between the emerging order and chaos. Against the background of our growing knowledge about the dynamics of complex systems, thinking about the future has become less mechanistic and naive. Questions have shifted toward the knowledge of the actors imagining different kinds of futures. In one domain in particular, financial markets, this kind of reasoning, and the mathematical tools that accompany it, have reached an impressive level of sophistication (Bernstein 1996).

This conceptual void arises for many different reasons. One of the reasons, however, emerges from the changing nature of the relationship between the state and the market. Because innovation is both a socioeconomic and a technological process, the support for innovation and entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as also being a pro-active responsibility of governments. In their classic book, How the West Grew Rich, Nathan Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell Jr. wrote in 1985: “In all well-ordered societies, political authority is dedicated to stability, security, and the status quo. It is thus singularly ill-qualified to direct or channel activity intended to produce instability, insecurity, and change” (Rosenberg & Birdzell Jr. 1985). Today, all highly industrialized nation-states have developed a set of policy tools to foster technological innovation and investment in research. While technological innovation in a more narrow or technical sense still occurs, it is now recognized that what is required is an innovative society.

Political agendas aimed at promoting technological innovation, including “foresight” exercises of various kinds, thus serve as proxies for constructing a shared vision of the future. This process is in turn indicative of the necessity to cope with the fragmentary and undecided nature of what we regard to be the future. There is a growing realization that innovation processes do not automatically follow from the results of basic research, via applied research towards their commercialization. This “linear model” appears as an idealized version of what happened after World War II (Gibbons et al. 1994). Today’s innovation processes are embedded in an RT&I eco-system, and cannot be left to entrepreneurs alone. The omnipresent quest for innovation in a globalized world is a hybrid of many elements. It includes the availability of venture capital, and the creativity of determined individuals as much as the flexibility of institutions and regulatory processes. An ever-expanding knowledge base and the appropriate research system must be in tune with each other, as well with the wider expectations of society. Innovation stands not only for technological, but also for social change and there will be winners and losers. Innovation faces barriers that are much more difficult to detect, because they inhere to the inertia of institutions and of large sociotechnical systems. Nor does innovation necessarily always offer the best technological solutions. Technology can become locked-in, as can innovations. All this is part of a public discourse intent on moving forward toward an uncertain future.

A HISTORICAL PRECEDENT

It is tempting to compare the recent emergence of innovation as a dominant concept of our times to a historical precedent. Concepts that are taken for granted are often projected backward, as though they had always existed. The historian of technology Leo Marx demonstrated that this occurred in the nineteenth century with the then-novel concept of technology (Marx 1997). The emergence of the word “technology” to name what allegedly was driving history during the mid-nineteenth century in the United States, is a reminder of how a word can be invested with new meaning, and thus often serves as a marker for far-reaching developments and for ongoing cultural changes in a society.

During the 1840s in the United States, two kinds of large-scale changes had become apparent: one ideological, involving the prevailing ideas about what was then called “the mechanical arts”; the other substantive, affecting their organizational and material matrix. The first is exemplified by a speech given by Senator Daniel Webster at the opening of a new section of the railroad in New Hampshire, in which he celebrates this “extraordinary era,” as “the progress of the age [that] has almost outstripped human belief,” and the “future [that] is known only to Omniscience” (Webster 1903). The idea of progress had been bound up with the accelerating rate of scientific discoveries and technical inventions before. But, as Marx explains, such advances had been important as a means and not as ends in themselves. This distinction had changed during Webster’s time, certainly in the United States. It resulted in the blurring of the distinction between mechanical means and political or normative ends, which did not remain without criticism.

The second substantive change occurred in the material and organizational character of technology. The change was embodied in machines, which were later replaced by a new kind of sociotechnological system: the railroad. The crucial mechanical components constitute only a small part of the whole, while concomitantly, the organizational features expanded tremendously. While the merger of science, the practical arts and industry was already under way, it was not until the end of the 19th century with the growth of the electrical and chemical industries that the transformative power of the new entity—now called technology—became fully visible. A pioneer, however, had already been using the word far ahead of his time. Boston botanist and physician, Jacob Bigelow, as early as 1826, “adopted the general name of Technology, a word sufficiently expressive” to denote “the practical applications of science, which may be considered useful, by promoting the benefit of society, together with the emolument of those who pursue them.” The term technology gained wide acceptance and visibility when it was adopted by a newly founded institution of higher learning, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, now better known as MIT, in 1862 (Webster 1903).

INNOVATION FILLS THE VOID

The dream of the Enlightenment thinkers – that science and technology would be a means to the ends of social improvement and political emancipation – was short-lived. As Bertrand Russell and others have pointed out, science does not free humanity from its most violent passions; on the contrary, it may even fuel them and technology has been used in acts of the most horrible destruction and brutality against humanity throughout the 20th century.

Closer to the present, the tangible burdens of unrelenting technological advances have become more visible and, even as we strive to eliminate or contain them as much as possible, the unintended consequences of increasing intervention in the natural and social environment are here to stay. The shockwave created in the late 1960s and early 1970s by books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) or Meadows’s Limits to Growth (1972) brought awareness of an ongoing environmental degradation and the onset of the much-vaunted risk society. While some of the environmental problems are being addressed, others have merely been transformed into increasing global inequalities. The environmental agenda today is dominated by the major theme of global climate change and its anthropogenic origins. The threats it poses are quite serious since they represent the unpredictable: extreme changes in weather and oscillations of climate with unprecedented impacts. Faced with these unknowns, the only valid prediction seems to be “to expect the unexpected” – which hardly offers a solid basis for future interventions.

When Albert Camus spoke of the twentieth century as the century of fear, he had in mind primarily the horrors of totalitarian regimes and the growing arsenals of weaponry with the potential to wipe out humanity. Yet, seen in the light of the more recent past, this fear has hardly diminished, although it’s form may have changed. It is no longer the one big catastrophe that looms at the horizon, fear is now induced in small but all-pervasive doses. Much of the potential and actual risk is invisible. With the real achievements of science and technology constantly being overshadowed by potential risks, the ideological void is palpably waiting to be filled.

On the substantive-organizational side, the impact of science and technology on our lives is even greater. The large sociotechnical systems that were the pride of modernity are still with us, although they have acquired a bewildering complexity. Due to the spread of computers and ongoing digitalization these systems have been partly decentralized, feeding processes of globalization. Jobs are outsourced and the world of the factory has become automated. We live in a high-tech world filled with digital devices and the digital processing of information. This new world is characterized by flattened hierarchies and technological platforms, by technologies dependent upon other products and on the steady supply of microchips. Operations once handled by people are now handled by software and the necessity to adapt to an ever-changing environment reigns supreme (Arthur 1996).

With the shift from the state to market forces, national boundaries have become easier to cross, but this may now function as incentive or obstacle for the creation of jobs and for increasing market shares. While the modern, pre-World War II associated management with large manufacturing firms, the post-World War II approach is based on the management of digital systems, such as computer grids and their ubiquitous and ever more sophisticated digital infrastructure. These approaches no longer serve to maintain a system for the mass production of standardized items. They tolerate and embrace heterogeneity, expecting disruptive change and bracing themselves to manage innovation on a day-to-day basis in a world of growing complexity (Hughes 1998).

The changes on the substantive-material side are far greater still. The term technoscience (which since the 1980s has appeared with increasing frequency) is often employed to capture the sense that many scientific discoveries are closely related to new technical instrumentation, which are in turn the result of scientific knowledge. The French historian of technology Marc Bloch once spoke of the creative force of the created object (la force créatrice de l’objet créé) (Raulff 1995); today we may note that this creative potential initially unfolds within the laboratory. And, is itself subsequently transformed in order to enter the market in a customized, often miniaturized, and highly fungible form. However the term technoscience, fails to capture one of the most salient characteristics of the new regime we have entered.

This shift of regime is marked by a profound transformation of both the technology itself and the context in which it works. It is a shift in scale, time and space; a shift from exotechnologies to endotechnologies. Technology has been commensurate in scale with that of the human habitat. Even when the sheer reach of the human habitat was vastly extended – with the use of transportation by ships, cars, and airplanes – the goal of technology was to serve the function that archaeologists and anthropologists insist upon: to enlarge the biologically restricted territorial human reach. Such exotechnologies have enabled us to cross larger distances in less time; they have enabled the mass production of artifacts as well as the construction of vast infrastructures for a variety of purposes, from growing, transporting, and conserving food and other products to living in comfort in a variety of climates.

The new regime of endotechnologies – biotechnologies and nanotechnologies together with information technologies and other enabling, symbolic technologies – is extending the scale of the human-built world, down to that of infinitesimal living organisms and within matter itself. It transforms the management of time in the sense that those genetic mechanisms which, for instance, induce the growth of plants, can now be reversed, with natural aging processes speeded up or delayed. Electricity once allowed to extend the use of daytime and to turn night into day. This same effect is now made possible by our intervention of the circadian rhythm and by our switching genes on and off. Endotechnologies transform space by including living organisms and by turning them into the site of human intervention.

In 1959, at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, Richard Feynman gave his by now famous lecture “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” about the prospect of manipulating objects on a small scale; he understood with astonishing foresight that the molecular structure of matter would become another prime site for new endotechnological procedures. Individual atoms can now be assembled and reassembled at will. New properties can be designed to build new materials. The “creative force of the created object” at work here comes with growing computational power and algorithms which has enabled us to generate, process, and retrieve an enormous amount of data on an unprecedented scale. This creative force is inherent in technical devices like the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) allowing the mass sequencing of genes (Rabinow 1996). The growing inter- or transdisciplinary convergence of mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry, information technology, and statistics, brings approaches and methods to bear on commonly defined problems.

These developments, while being greeted enthusiastically by the scientific community, also create a lot of unease in wider society. They raise questions as what it means to be human, who defines what is “natural,” and what is considered “cultural.” With every new scientific and technological advance the number of options increases, yet it is impossible to foresee many of the consequences. Uncertainties abound and have become inherent to the process of producing new knowledge. As the number of potential future options grows, the number of escape routes diminishes. We have to move forward toward a highly uncertain future – but how?

Innovation signals the emergence of something new that is already present, but that is only partially recognizable. It may bring into focus the otherwise invisible links that bind together key concepts in a changing web of meanings. I am drawing here on the seminal work of Raymond Williams. When examining the transformation of culture, Williams discovered a curious interdependence or mutual reflexivity in the relationship between concurrent changes in language and society. He found that the word culture itself, like other key words such as class, industry, and democracy, had acquired its meanings in response to the very changes he meant to analyze (Williams 1958 [1983]). The quest for innovation is such a concept at the intersection of change.

Contrary to Bruno Latour’s proposition that “We have never been modern,” (Latour 1993) we are all modern today. But modernity is no longer a program that will deliver – it has already delivered the building blocks, the institutions and structures we use. With the future open, the challenge lies in the belief that worthwhile novelty will emerge with power sufficient to generate further worthwhile novelties, which will in turn lead to further economic growth and well-being. This process should be sufficiently open to incorporate human values, like forging sustainable links to the natural environment or furthering education as a means of social inclusion. But how to translate such values and their internal contradictions into a concept that will fill the void? The only other concept (or Denkfigur in the sense of Ludwik Fleck) that would offer a credible alternative is evolution. Taking the concept out of its original biologic domain of meaning and transferring it metaphorically to the social and cultural domain, however, has proven to be extremely tricky (Campbell 1975). Moreover, evolution, after having stripped the world of divine intervention, leaves no room for human agency.

Innovation is a concept that crosses domains easily. Innovation signals the positive direction where the unknown is to be found and it is therefore reassuring. In contrast to the concept of technology, innovation cannot be transformed into an object since it is a process, amenable to action and interaction, even if it carries its own load of uncertainty. But there is the chance that opportunities will outweigh whatever negative consequences the future has in store.

The impact on society and on the changes that will be introduced, especially through the next wave of the so-called convergent technologies, bio-, nano-, neuro-, and infotechnologies, will be profound. Human reproductive technologies, for example, are viewed with suspicion, as they threaten to upset kinship networks regarded as “natural” although they constitute in reality a mixture of biologic predispositions and variable social arrangements. Yet, as history demonstrates, not every slippery slope is necessarily perilous, and values, however immutable they might appear, are subject to change in accordance with other changes in the society at large. Caught between the understandable wish to resist and to preserve the given order and the prospects of a new but largely unknown, hybrid order, the rallying cry is to move forward.

The meaning of innovation is affected by these processes as well. It is no longer, as Schumpeter in his classical analysis at the beginning of the twentieth century saw “merely” a recombination of known factors that enables the entrepreneurial individual to gain a decisive advantage over the competition. A more extended notion of innovation, based on the potential of “radical” novelty and one which therefore embraces the uncertainty inherent, has emerged. As early as the 1970s, the economist G. L. S. Shackle spoke about “essential novelty” as idiosyncratic of an evolutionary approach in techno-social innovations that includes openness toward an unknown future (Shackle 1969).

Paradoxically, it is this due to circularity – or modern reflexivity – of innovation that it has the ability to fill this void. It is not an unmoved mover behind the impersonal forces of a technocratic society, as might have been the case not too long ago. Technocracy itself, as a recognizable structure, is being undone by innovation – only to be reconfigured as a widely dispersed, interlocking form of governance in which not only corporate actors and governments, but also civil society, interact in a conflict-ridden struggle for the newly emerging global order. Innovation is the only credible response currently available for coping with the uncertainty it has helped to generate. It is credible in the sense that it does not preclude plurality, diversity, or variation. On the contrary, it invites and thrives on them. Innovation— although its direction is heavily biased toward scientific-technological advances – does not preclude manifestation in other domains: social innovations, for instance, which might bring about other forms of governance, with the task of integrating the current skepticism and prevailing unease with regard to certain technological innovations. It does not preclude the possibility of new forms of cultural innovation, with the arts confronting the way in which the disturbances emanate from the latest run of feasible scientific-technical breakthroughs (Nowotny 2003).

Technological developments merely provide opportunities, and it is up to us, individually as well as collectively, to act upon them. It does not predetermine any specific end result. The only determinant it resolutely insists upon, is the option of change. Dealing with risks? No problem – you may adopt the precautionary principle. You might also choose not to espouse the apocalyptic warnings contained in the “risk-society” and instead opt for a “modern” risk culture as it is embodied by the global financial markets (Green 2000). The argument of choice, so deeply entrenched both in neoliberal economics and liberal democracies, has benefited the empowerment of consumers, without always assuring that the preconditions for exerting choice are being met.

In brief, the concept of innovation is closer than other concepts, like the “knowledge society” (which invokes counterconcepts, e.g., ignorance and the right not to know), to the continuity of an iterative modernity, punctuated by relapses into recurrent crises and into periods of vocal criticism. Innovation contains a self-fulfilling, but brittle promise: that only innovation can provide us with a way to cope with innovation.

CULTURES OF TECHNOLOGY

Culture matters in attempts to explain why economic opportunities have been seized in one country or region while failing in others. Culture matters not only for economic development, but also for political development (Lawrence & Huntington 2000) with regard to corporations and organizations moving increasingly in global environments. The culture of an organization is said to be pivotal to understanding how it adapts to ongoing changes. The emphasis is on shared conceptions of what needs to be learned, how it is to be learned, and why (Dierkes et al. 2001). Culture is understood here in its most encompassing sense: a shared scheme of interpretation that enables the organization to cope with change.

Culture permeates an enormously wide range of social activities. It binds communities together and shapes them and their interactions with outsiders. It is linked to innovation in the sense that it can be predisposed to finding certain innovative solutions to a problem while eschewing others. In an interesting case study, the economic historian Avner Greif analyzed the relationship between culture, innovation, and the institutional structure. Integrating game-theory with sociological concepts and basing his work on comparative historical material, he examines cultural factors that have led two premodern societies, one from the Arab and the other from the Latin world. Based upon historical records from the late eleventh century, Greif demonstrates that the two societies of medieval traders, the Genoese and the Maghribs, were involved in mercantile relationships all over the Mediterranean. They employed comparable naval technology and traded in similar merchandise. The success of their trade depended to a large extent on their ability to mitigate the provision of services required for handling a merchant’s goods abroad. A merchant could either provide these services himself or, as was most often the case, employ overseas agents to handle the merchandise, since this was a time-consuming and risky endeavor.

Since the Genoese society was more individualistic, while the Maghribs were collectivistic, their strategies differed. The Genoese responded in an “integrated” manner, the Maghribs in a “segregated” manner. Both projected their cultural beliefs onto the new situation of opportunities they saw. But their cultural beliefs did not specify what the best response would be. The “segregated” response culminated in merchants preferring to hire agents from their own society, while in the “integrated” response, there was no predefined preference. In the end, both systems were efficient in the sense that they produced innovations, albeit in different ways, and each had to pay a price for its relative strengths and weaknesses. Nevertheless, Greif concludes, the individualism displayed by the Genoese medieval society may have cultivated the seeds that contributed to later economic and technological development and to the so-called rise of the West (Greif 1994).

To approach technology from a cultural perspective it is, therefore, at once self-evident and highly demanding: technology is one of the most consequential cultural practices to have evolved since the beginnings of humanity, but it also requires one to confront both technology’s materiality and the cultural system of meaning with which technological practices are invested. Such a perspective raises questions as to the identity of the makers, controllers, facilitators, and shapers of technology. The enormous impact of today’s information and communication technologies, including their powers of visualization, is linked to their dissemination throughout society.

What is gained by conceiving of technology not just as an ensemble of artifacts or complex sociotechnical systems, but as culture? If we take the meaning of culture in its strictest anthropological sense – although there is no commonly agreed-upon definition of culture in anthropology either – we can say that culture independent of social interactions, does not exist. Culture is about social relations with meanings attached to what people believe, do, and how they relate to each other and to their environment. Technological culture includes technical artifacts as an integral part of this web of significance. The web of significance that human beings have spun themselves, and in which they are suspended, following Clifford Geertz’s description (Geertz 1972), makes sense only when it is linked to human agency, intentions, interactions, results, and to the ensuing effects and transformations. Technology enters in an immensely practical function as a mediating object, acting upon social interactions and relationships and being acted upon.

Cultures of technology are about socio-technical arrangements. To speak about different cultures of technology breaks down the distinction between the material tool or its built-in technological efficiency, and the social organization, including the individual user and their social interactions. Cultures of technology are about shared meanings. Culture organizes practices. The processes and the range of ways in which this is done also matter. To focus on cultures of technology does not imply a neglect of the subtle impact that technology has on our lives, nor does it ignore the first steps in the genesis of emerging new technology. Rather, the emphasis is on what John Pickstone calls “ways of doing” (Pickstone 2000).

Technologies work at different levels and in different ways. They work through the tight or loose coupling of the elements that make up a technological system, the ways in which people organize their work and through the division of labor in manufacturing or in service industries. They work by mediating social interaction and in another very powerful way by generating symbolic and cultural meanings. Any comprehensive account of technological innovation must allow for these meanings, including their supposed derivation from science. If we can see how the various elements of technology fit together in history and our present, then we will have a better model for understanding technological innovation, including its cultural meaning.

Cultures of technology should therefore prepare us to understand where the quest for innovation comes from, forcefully pushing us to go far beyond any imagined “endless frontier.” Innovation is no longer a goal, since it has, by its very nature, espoused an unending strive for the unpredictable and the unknown. Perhaps it has become a means – however, it can only constitute a tentative attempt to cope with the idea of a future that stubbornly remains uncertain.

The idea of innovation, as I have argued, is currently filling the void of negotiating the future. One of its strongest bargaining chips is scientific and technological innovation; but it remains closely associated with the concept of risk. At present, risk is usually confounded with danger. While risks can, at least in principle, be calculated, the harm associated with danger remains of unknown proportions. The modern concept of risk arose in the sense of daring, i.e. putting up an asset for disposition against the chances of another, unknown, but higher gain. Modern risk was underwritten by the belief that, at least to some extent, alternative futures could be devised and that it was worth betting on them. Over the centuries, we have learned to cope with the risks of technology, and it emerged as one of the most powerful means of shaping this belief into some kind of tangible planning.

Today, the modern management of risk, notwithstanding its many unresolved problems, has become highly professionalized. But technology, often lumped together indiscriminately with the concept of science or seen as merely applied science, has become associated with the negative consequences that impact the social fabric of modern societies. Confidence in the achievement of sustainable technological progress has become precarious, punctuated time and again by scandals involving the political management and regulation of risks associated with technological advances. The quest for ongoing innovation promises a way out, but the links between technological innovation and social innovation remain woefully underdeveloped. Its open-endedness suggests a new flexibility and may point in the direction of improved and safe technology. It gestures toward collective learning processes. But in order to fill the conceptual void, these learning processes must broaden the concept of innovation, filling it with a culture of technology that integrates the technological with the social.

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1 This is a slightly edited version of the Introduction “The Quest for Innovation and Cultures of Technology”, in: Helga Nowotny (ed.) (2006). Cultures of Technology and the Quest for Innovation. Berghahn Books, pp. 1–23.