A new direction for innovation studies? Reconciling the ordinary and the extraordinary

Extract

Among scholars with an interest in the many faceted and constantly shifting subject of innovation, the work of Peter Swann, Emeritus Professor of Industrial Economics at the University of Nottingham has always attracted much comment. Common Innovation is his latest and certainly most personal contribution to the field. Its core concept is remarkably simple:

Common innovation is carried out by the ‘common man and woman’ for their own benefit. (p. 3)

The implications, however, are potentially transformative in terms of how, in future, innovation will be defined and explored as a social phenomenon. In this review, I will try to unpack the key concepts in Common Innovation for the prospective reader, but also to situate them in the historical trajectory of innovation studies, and to indicate what seem to me to be most significant challenges they pose for how the study of innovation might evolve.

Although not part of a formal trilogy as such, readers familiar with Prof. Swann’s immediately preceding volumes (Putting Econometrics in its Place (2006) and The Economics of Innovation (2009)) may well see Common Innovation as completing a cycle of work on the nature and dynamics of innovation. The perceptive reader will pick up on recurring themes that, throughout a career spanning some three decades, have become the signature of this always probing scholar (Windrum et al. 2013). Many of these, for example on the dynamics of consumer demand, were instrumental in drawing attention to quite fundamental aspects of innovation that had been ignored, oversimplified or marginalized in much of the mainstream literature (Swann 2001, 1999). Likewise, his extensive work on standards highlighted the significance of factors that do not immediately seem to be related to innovation, or that may even seem inimical to it (Swann et al. 1996).