One of the first frameworks developed for understanding the relation of science and technology to the economy has been the linear model of innovation. The model postulated that innovation starts with basic research, is followed by applied research and development, and ends with production and diffusion. The precise source of the model remains nebulous, having never been documented. Several authors who have used, improved, or criticized the model in the past fifty years rarely acknowledged or cited any original source. The (...) model usually was taken for granted. According to others, however, it comes directly from V. Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier. This article traces the history of the linear model, suggesting that it developed in three steps corresponding to three scientific communities looking at science analytically. The article argues that statistics is a main reason the model is still alive despite criticisms, alternatives, and having been proclaimed dead. (shrink)

In the late 1980s, a new conceptual framework appeared in the science, technology, and innovation studies: the National Innovation System. The framework suggests that the research system's ultimate goal is innovation, and that the system is part of a larger system composed of sectors such as government, university, and industry and their environment. The framework also emphasized the relationships between the components or sectors, as the ``cause'' that explains the performance of innovation systems. Most authors agree that the framework came (...) from researchers like Freeman, Nelson, and Lundvall. In this article, the author want to go further back in time and show what the ``system approach'' owes to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and its very early works from the 1960s. This article develops the idea that the system approach was fundamental to OECD work, and that, although not using the term National Innovation System as such, the organization considerably influenced the above-mentioned authors. (shrink)

Science as a body of knowledge and as a method has been discussed and debated for centuries among philosophers and ‘men of science’. This paper looks at research, the latest element added to the discourse on science. Science as research, conducted at the level of individuals or organizations, has received increased attention over the course of the twentieth century in public discourse on what science is. This paper documents how different players enlarged the meaning of research from the academic sphere (...) to also encompass government and industry, and from research to research and development. It also examines the restriction of research to mean laboratory research, and the marginalization of the role of research in explaining economic progress. It is suggested that these changes bear witness to a shift in society’s cultural values: from research to development to innovation. (shrink)

The measurement of science and technology is now fifty years old. It owes a large part of its existence to the work of the National Science Foundation and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the 1950s and 1960s. Given the centrality of S&T statistics in science studies, it is surprising that no history of the measurement exists in the literature. This article outlines such a history. The history is cast in the light of social statistics. Like social statistics, (...) S&T indicators are produced mainly by governments but differ in a number of aspects. First, they have not been developed to control individuals. Second, they have taken shape from the start at the international level. Third, they reflect a consensus among states and their organizations. This article shows that this specificity is due to the sociopolitics that drives S&T measurement. (shrink)

Polarization is a generalized feature of intellectual life. Few authors however have studied polarities as they actually occur in every day life and discourse. This paper proposes two hypotheses to account for the pervasiveness of polarities. The first relates to uncertainty. Almost everything that touches our lives is filled with irreducible uncertainty. As a rhetoric, polarization uses arguments from (future) consequences in order to manage the future. The second hypothesis relates to phenomenology: body and behavior incorporate tensions or dualistic properties (...) which are easily reproduced in language and thinking. Polarized thinking helps people to imagine extremes so that they may better anticipate the spectrum of possibilities available for action. The article concludes with remarks on the dangers of (over)generalizing and universalizing particulars (or extremes) in polarity based argumentation. (shrink)

For centuries, _innovation_ was a political and contested concept and linguistic weapon used against one's enemy. To support their case, opponents of innovation made use of arguments from ethos and pathos to give power and sustenance to their criticisms and to challenge the innovators. However, since the nineteenth century the arguments have changed completely. _Innovation_ gradually got rehabilitated. This article looks at one type of rehabilitation: the semantic rehabilitation. People started to reread history and to redescribe what _innovation_ is. What (...) was bad innovation became good innovation because of long-lasting and beneficial effects, so it was believed. (shrink)

If anyone in Victoria’s reign had tried to put himself outside the mystique of that society and, from outside, coldly to dissect the word gentleman, we can guess what would have happened to him. Wherever he had found confusion he would have been told ‘But of course you can’t understand. That is because you yourself are not a gentleman’ .In recent years the phrase “innovation studies” has come to be used by a group of scholars to name what was previously (...) called science and technology studies, then science, technology and innovation studies . What is “innovation studies”? Some years ago Ian Fagerberg and Bart Vespagen produced analyses that “defined” the field by way of bibliometric data . Now, these same researchers have produced an argumentation that, in principle, gives a kind of coherence to the field. Innovation Studies: Evolution & Future Cha .. (shrink)

Innovation is a key concept of modernity. It acquired its lettres de noblesse in the twentieth century, thanks to or because of economics and technology. However, for centuries the concept was essentially pejorative. How can we explain this connotation? This article suggests that one of the crucial moments is the Reformation. Using official documents of the time, the article studies the vocabulary of the English Reformation and documents the meanings and the uses made of innovation. The article suggests that innovation (...) served two functions or purposes: an injunction and an accusation of non-conformity. Thereafter, innovation became a linguistic tool of polemic. (shrink)

Much has been written about the linear model of innovation. While it may have been the dominant model used to explain technological innovation for decades, alternatives did exist. One such alternative—generally discussed as being the exact opposite of the linear model—is the demand-pull model. Beginning in the 1960s, people from different disciplines started looking at technological innovation from a demand rather than a supply perspective. The theory was that technological innovation is stimulated by market demand rather than by scientific discoveries. (...) However, few traces of the demand-pull model remain in the literature today. This article looks at what happened to the demand-pull model from a historical perspective, at three points in time: birth, crystallization, and death. It suggests that the idea of demand as a factor explaining technological innovation emerged in the 1960s, was formalized into models in the 1970-1980s, then got integrated into “multidimensional” models. From then on, the demand-pull model disappeared from the literature, existing only as an object of the past, like the linear model of innovation. (shrink)

The history of innovation as a category is dominated by economists and by the contribution of J. A. Schumpeter. This paper documents the contribution of a neglected but influential author, the American sociologist William F. Ogburn. Over a period of more than 30 years, Ogburn developed pioneering ideas on three dimensions of technological innovation: origins, diffusion, and effects. He also developed the first conceptual framework for innovation studies—based on the concept of cultural lags—which led to studying and forecasting the impacts (...) of technological innovation on society. All in all, Ogburn has been as important to the sociology of technology as Robert K. Merton has been to the sociology of science and Schumpeter to the economics of technological innovation. (shrink)

J. Schumpeter is a key figure, even a seminal one, on technological innovation. Most economists who study technological innovation refer to Schumpeter and his pioneering role in introducing innovation into economic studies. However, despite having brought forth the concept of innovation in economic theory, Schumpeter provided few if any analyses of the process of innovation itself. This paper suggests that the origin of systematic studies on technological innovation owes its existence to the economist W. Rupert Maclaurin from MIT. In the (...) 1940s and 1950s, Maclaurin developed Schumpeter’s ideas, analyzing technological innovation as a process composed of several stages or steps, and proposed a theory of technological innovation, later called the linear model of innovation. The paper also argues that Maclaurin constructed one of the first taxonomies for measuring technological innovation. (shrink)

Official science and technology statistics arefifty years old. Among industrial countries,the forerunners were the United States, Canadaand Great Britain. This paper traces thedevelopment and the construction of S&Tstatistics in these three countries, and theirsubsequent standardization, mainly by theOECD, in the 1960s. It shows how military andscience policy needs drove the construction ofstatistics, until economic considerations cameto dominate their development. It alsodiscusses how statistics interacted withpolitics by way of studies that documentedgaps between OECD Member countries and betweenthe OECD and the USSR.

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. (shrink)