Article ID: CBB001211966

“Innovation Studies”: The Invention of a Specialty (2012)

unapi

Innovation has become a very popular concept over the twentieth century. However, few have stopped to study the origins of the category and to critically examine the studies produced on innovation. This paper conducts such an analysis on one type of innovation, namely technological innovation. The study of technological innovation is over one hundred years old. From the early 1900s onward, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, and economists began theorizing about technological innovation, each from his own respective disciplinary framework. However, in the last forty years an economic and dominant understanding of technological innovation has developed: technological innovation defined as commercialized invention. This paper documents the origins of this representation and the tradition of research to which it gave rise: innovation studies. More specifically, it analyzes what distinguishes this tradition from that concerned with technological change as the use of inventions in industrial production, and looks at why such a tradition originated in Europe.

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Description On the development of technological innovation studies as an academic discipline.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001211966/

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Authors & Contributors
Fontaine, Philippe
Godin, Benoît
Backhouse, Roger E.
Mamidipudi, Annapurna
Balmer, Andrew
Will, Fabienne
Concepts
History of technology, as a discipline
Sociology
Technology and society
Technological innovation
Economics
Academic disciplines
Time Periods
20th century
21st century
20th century, late
19th century
20th century, early
Places
United States
Netherlands
Greece
India
Institutions
University of Chicago
American Sociological Association
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