Prologue: innovation and sociological theory

ABSTRACT

This short essay aims at presenting a theoretical framework for the systemic approach to innovation studies. Namely, the work will highlight the complex and multidisciplinary aspects of each innovation process: as a matter of fact, when innovation takes place, it involves diverse category of actors: scientists, engineers, political authorities, entrepreneurs, and public opinion. Second, the work will focus on the uncertainty that each innovation process entails, especially in terms of intersection between technological and cognitive dimensions. The conclusions will assess that systemics are the best epistemic approach for dealing with those issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation
• sociological theory
• systemic theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Within this framework, a reliable methodology for studying innovation cases implies observing, for a given social context, the cultural productions that contain those assumptions – religious mythologies, political ideologies, historical narrations, etc. – and trying to comprehend the effects of those assumptions on all phases of the process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu

Massimiliano Ruzzeddu is Tenured Researcher at University Niccolò Cusano in Rome. He is Vice President of World Complexity Science Academy. He is co-director of WCSA Book Series di Cambridge Scholars Publishing and Honorary Editor of the journal System Research and Behavioral Science (Wiley). He authored several scientific works in Epistemology of Social Science and Sociological Theory. Recently, he edited together with prof. Andrea Millefiorini the book Between Rationality and Irrationality, Harmattan, Paris.