Towards creativity-oriented innovation policies based on a hermeneutic approach to the knowledge-space nexus

Abstract

The hermeneutic approach to a proper understanding of the processes of knowledge creation that is proposed by Cusinato and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2016) is indubitably a cognitive turn in the economic literature on innovation, and it may be a first step in the construction of a new scientific paradigm. In fact, it explores the deep-lying roots of creativity and innovation as cognitive processes and links them with such relational spaces as the-abstract-‘milieu’ and the-real-city. Accordingly, the hermeneutic approach positions itself on a long-standing scientific trajectory which originated with the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1934, 1964) and was relaunched by the evolutionary paradigm in the 1980s (Nelson and Winter 1982; Dosi 1982; Dosi et al. 1988; Lundval 1988) and the more recent studies on the role of knowledge and knowledge creation in economic development (Cappellin 2007; Cappellin and Wink 2009). It thus characterizes itself as a critique of the limits of the logical-positivist and cognitivist approach.