Making sense of innovation: from weapon to instrument to buzzword

Abstract

Innovation is a concept that everyone understands spontaneously – or thinks he understands – ; 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 paper, 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.