Critiquing the direction for innovation: the interplay of why, how, and what
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This editorial introduces a special issue interrogating the direction of innovation – not just how fast or effectively it proceeds, but where, why, and for whom it moves. Drawing on political philosophy and critical innovation studies, contributors engage with questions of justice, legitimacy, and contestation across three levels: the directing (acceleration), the direction (choice of goals), and the directionality (plurality of pathways) of innovation. The special issue provides an overview of the central discussions around the concept of directionality and extends responsible innovation discourse by incorporating concepts such as exnovation and resistance in relation to political and normative approaches to justice, as well as alternative conceptions of the relationship between humans and the world such as Buen Vivir. Case studies on climate innovation, digital transitions, merger policy, plastic exnovation and platform cooperativism complement theoretical reflections on the ethics of direction. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, the special issue examines how market, state and civil society actors co-shape innovation processes – such as business innovation, mission-oriented innovation or grassroots innovation; how this is understood in Schumpeterian, Hayekian to Keynesian and new critical theories of innovation; and why this matters for democracy, sustainability and equality once the crucial normative property of the direction of innovation is acknowledged. Analyzing the interplay of the why, how and what of innovation, the contributions provide the state of the art for critique of the direction of innovation beyond the current techno-economic paradigm.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.024 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".