Innovation Society Today

The book focusses on innovation as transformation of a more or less intentional nature and as timeless phenomenon. Innovation as a sustained, creative effort and the systematic generation of novelty is regarded as one of the core institutions of a modern economy. Furthermore it decribes the further shift which is taking place in society's relationship with innovation: innovation is transcending its traditional boundaries to become the major driving force in the society of the future. In contrast to earlier practice, innovation has moved out of the niches of sporadic novelty in monasteries, guilds, and the arts into the observable zones of organized innovation. The preferred areas for economically defined innovation are business, markets, and enterprises. The public is most aware of technically oriented innovation, that is, the engineering of new products and processes in research and industrial laboratories. Chronologically and sequentially structured, this form of innovation fills the space between conception and invention on the one hand and diffusion on the other. With an eye to the society of the future, for a number of decades we have observed the persistent expansion of this innovation zone to the point where innovation in society is ubiquitous, heterogeneous, and reflexive.