The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

SUSTAINABILITY, RATIONALITY AND THE SELF-REFLECTION OF MODERNITY

The transition to sustainability is a social challenge demanding “innovative thinking”. However, tack­ling innovation for sustainability implies a clarifi­cation of concepts. Sustainability has irrupted as an unexpected emergence in our consciousness, our discoursiveness and our ethics; our social organization and dayly practices. Sustainability has become an imperative for survival - for the reconstruction of the relations of nature with culture - and as a search of new meanings for life.

But, how is innovation embedded in rational­ity? We may define rationality as the complex order of social procceses, as a system of rules of thought and behaviour established within economic, political and ideological structures that legitimize and orient social actions and give meaning to society as a whole. These rules and structures guide social practices and processes towards certain ends, through socially constructed means, which in turn reflect in moral norms, cul­tural beliefs, institutional arrangements and modes of production. Rationality is thus organized in 3 main orders of rationality:

1. Formal and theoretical rationality that organizes the conscious control of reality through the construction of abstract concepts that constitute rational orders and cosmo - visions that rule the modes of production and juridical rules that rationalize de World lives of the people.

2. Instrumental and practical rational­ity (zweckrationalittit), that organizes the methodical pursue of certain practical and predetermined ends through the precise calculation of efficient means.

3. Substantive rationality, that organizes social actions based on value principles, which vary in their internal content, comprehensiveness and consistence; these values are irreduc­ible to a scheme of relations between ends and efficient means. Substantive rationality internalizes cultural diversity, axiological relativity and social conflict in the face of different values and interests (Weber, 1978).

The challenges of sustainability call for many different areas ofinnovation: innovation in theory and science from where new paradigms are emerg­ing: environmental and ecological economics, the science of climate change, systems theories, energy saving systems and clean production technologies, etc. Dematerialization of produc­tion calls for innovation in production processes through eco-efficiency to optimize the amount of matter that enters the productive process and is degraded in its “throughput”; to minimize the entropic degradation of energy in the extraction, industrial transformation, agricultural produc­tion, recycling of waste, and in the consumption processes involved in the overall metabolism of nature. Thus, new areas ofinnovation are emerging within the prevailing rationality of modernity, in what mainstream sociology denominates “reflec­tive modernity” (Beck, Giddens & Lash, 1997).

Reflective modernity calls for a reorganization of the social system in order to ensure its stabil­ity and sustainability: that is for the ecological reestructuring and refunctioning. However, a difference must be established between the vari­ous theoretical and practical areas of innovation activated by “reflective modernity” for the transi­tion towards sustainability. Here different forms of creativity are involved, from novelty in live forms emerging from the technological intervention in biological organization and anthropogenically induced environmental changes, to creativity in the realm of thought: from scientific paradigm shifts and methodological innovations to cultural changes and social reorganization.

Reflective modernity intends to activate and make use of different philosophical sources and scientific and technological resources to solve the socio-environmental problems generated by modernity, by the cultural imprint and the eco­logical footprint generated by the application of knowledge within its prevalent rationality. This “reflective” process certainly has generated an enormous outburst of innovations: for conserva­tion ecology, energy saving technologies, green production systems, economic instruments for environmental management. These innovations are currently inscribed in a new geopolitics of sustainable development (Kyoto Protocol, Clean Development Mechanism, economic valuation of environmental goods and services, including carbon sinks).

In the academic litterature, the term innovation has arisen from the entrepreneural and managerial world, as the creative application of knowledge to production. Novelties in thinking (schools of thought or philosophical traditions) are seldom conceived as “innovations”. In the field of science, changes of paradigms are refered to as scientific revolutions, rather than innovations in knowledge (Kuhn, 1962). It would seem even more awkward to refer to cultural changes as innovations - even those induced by the technoeconomic intervention on nature, such as cultural changes from forced adaptations to climate change; the emergence of new entities (cyborgs), hibrids of organic, tech­nological and symbolic orders in the “reinvention of nature” (Haraway, 1991); or the reinvention of identities resulting from cultural strategies to readapt to the processes of globalization.

Innovation most clearly refers to the applica­tion of knowledge to new ways of reorganizing an already objectified and rationalized world, from the application of its scientific principles and technological developments, to process man­agement and product design, rather than to the breakthrough of ideas of new modes of thinking, of understanding the creativeness of nature and the reinvention of cultural identities. Innovation can be defined as the purposeful organization of knowledge for the production of new means for the efficient management of processes, guided by the principles of instrumental rationality. Thus, sustainable development, as an emergent social goal, has triggered a broad array of innovative processes in science and technology.

Innovation is by essence and definition tech­nological, managerial and organizational novelties brought about by applying knowledge through creative thinking to new problem-solving areas, to make processes more efficient, to use new materials, to apply new methods. In this sense, sustainable development is a global goal that involves and activates changes in scientific and technological paradigms, in patterns of production and consumption behaviours.

Knowledge has become a tradable good and as such, subject to innovation drawn by economic purposes and not by a pure epistemophilic drive. Innovation of knowledge became the objective of managing the optimal harmonization of the productive factors, of guiding entrepreneurship for financing and marketing tradable goods where knowledge and information systems have become strategic means of production. Thus, the manage­ment of knowledge has become the “basis of the technological, managerial and organizational core competencies of the organization in the pursuit of dynamic innovation and sustainable competitive advantage.”

Innovation is the creative processes involved in producing something new, especially something useful and with economic value. Innovation brings emergent and even radical and revolutionary changes in production organization: a new good, a new technology, new production systems and commercialization methods. However, following Schumpeter (1934), the scholarly literature on innovation distinguishes between invention -an idea made manifest - and innovation - ideas ap­plied successfully in practice. Innovation in the field of economics implies the production of new organizing methods and technologies that increase economic value. Innovation leading to increased productivity, through research and development, is the fundamental source of wealth in an economy.

Invention is the embodiment of a new idea. It is the outcome of research or practical inventive­ness that can be embodied in a paradigm shift that reorganizes knowledge, or a new prototype or design that is patentable. Inventions become innovations when they are “developed” and put to use effectively in a new social, economic or commercial reorganization. Innovation involves creativity, but not all outputs of human creativity are innovations. Innovation involves acting on the creative ideas to make some specific and tangible difference in the objectified reality, resulting in new or altered processes within the economic or­ganization, or changes in the products and services provided. Through these varieties of viewpoints, creativity is seen as the basis for innovation, and innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization.

An innovation can be distinguished from an invention or a scientific discovery by the fact that an innovation is defined by an applicative perspective. The scientific enterprise intends to discover the internal workings of reality; theory uncovers the organization of the real. Through theoretical models and empiric experimentation, science constructs the laws that rule the functioning of the world: reality. Innovation in the economy and in technology is not an act of discovery, but of application and reordering of available knowl­edge of the World to generate a novelty. From the generativity of matter, to epigenesis in the evolu­tion of nature, to ordering from chaos (Prigogine & Stengers, 1984), the novelties emerging from Nature can be distinguished from the discover­ies of science and the inventiveness of culture; from the creativeness of art, the productiveness of economy, the innovations of technology and the originality of design.

Innovations are productions that because of their novelty can be registered as property rights. Although creative thinking is claimed to be uni­versal knowledge, with the progress of techno - scientific knowledge and its application to the workings of the economy, these innovations have become patented and tradable knowledge, thus distinguishable from scientific and philosophical knowledge, as well as other forms of knowledge and wisdom which have a more intrinsic value. However, with the over-economization of the modern world these traditional or non-marketable forms of knowledge are becoming targets of an extended ecological global economy. Thus the emergence of tradable knowledge over environ­mental goods and services, or the appropriation of indigenous knowledge by ethno-bio-prospecting carried out by biotechnological enterprises (Bell- mann, Dutfield & Melendez-Ortiz, 2003).