Responsibility and the hidden politics of directionality: opening up ‘innovation democracies’ for sustainability transformations

ABSTRACT

Developing earlier work, this paper explores analytic and political implications of ideas about direction in innovation. Unduly hidden in mainstream innovation and sustainability transformations literatures, crucial issues arise for responsible innovation. Although essential to both rigour and effectiveness, key realities tend to be concealed by general hegemonic forces in contemporary global colonial modernity, as well as by more specific expediencies to power and privilege in particular settings. To help resist these obscuring pressures, three contrasting (frequently conflated) meanings are distinguished. Directing innovation involves driving narrow motivating processes towards some given end. The direction of innovation concerns broader steering of pathways towards more openly chosen ends. Directionality of innovation entails grasping deeper political potentialities spanning pluralities of ends. Seriously eroding innovation policy and research alike, much current governance activity fails appropriately to focus or act on these distinctions. To assist greater policy robustness and legitimacy, this paper points to important (but often neglected) practises in each regard. To properly address social and ecological sustainability imperatives, greater attention is advocated to irreducibly political aspects of responsible innovation. This entails renewed emphasis not only on precaution, participation and accountability, but on actively supporting emancipatory struggle towards plural ‘directions for progress’ in innovation democracies.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation direction
• directionality
• colonial modernity
• sustainability transformation
• pathways approach

Driving, steering and grasping the pluralities of innovation

Across many settings and perspectives, momentous references to the direction of innovation (Nelson 1962) and later associated ideas of directionality (Stirling 1994, 2009) have long featured in academic, business, government and civil society debates on science and technology (Feenberg 1999). The resulting burgeoning directionality discourse (Edler, Kuhlmann, and Helfrich 2023) is significant not only for thinking and practice around innovation (Schot and Steinmueller 2018) and transformation (Schot, Kanger, and Foxon 2018), but also for wider policy making (Jakobsen et al. 2022) and governance (Lindner 2016). Repercussions are arguably nowhere more salient, than for research and practice aiming to make institutions and cultures around science and technology more responsible (Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013).

In short, profound issues open up around innovation that must be acknowledged not just as matters for policy, but as intrinsically deeply political (Cairney 2016). This is because implications of directionality in any given setting are at the same time openly-endedly: normative (concerning divergent equally-valid values and interests) (Schlaile et al. 2017); epistemic (involving irreducibly diverse understandings and incertitudes) (Ghosh, Yuana, and Schiller 2021); and ontological (across multiple enactings of pluralities of worlds) (Arora and Stirling 2023). By addressing each of these aspects in conventional innovation research and policy ‘directionality discourse’, traction can be gained on otherwise less visible material political conditions with which they associate (Butler 1993; Foucault 1971; Gramsci 1971; Habermas 1981; Jasanoff 2017; Laclau and Mouffe 2001). If important efforts being made towards responsible innovation fail to address the authentic depth and scope of these challenges, they risk betraying the full implications of directionality.

Repercussions of these directionality challenges (Bergek, Hellsmark, and Karltorp 2023) were initially addressed at, more than by, innovation studies (Stirling 1994, 2009). That they are often still marginalised in economistically-framed and policy-oriented approaches (Stirling 2011) makes it especially necessary to explore them systematically here. This applies all the more, because present levels of relative inattention seem partly due to imprints on mainstream ideas about innovation (Kozlov 2019) exercised by prevailing hegemonic worldwide political conditions that it is very difficult to avoid. Albeit often tellingly neglected in polite policy debates (Stirling 2019a) and much prior work in innovation studies (Arora and Stirling 2023), the political context currently distinctively shaping innovation practice might be recognised as colonial modernity (Mignolo 2011; Quijano 2011). This heterogeneous globalising formation can be observed to encompass all recent historic varieties not only of market capitalism (Hall and Siskice 2001), but also state capitalism (Ang 2020) and authoritarian communism (Gilpin 2001) and fascism (Marcuse 1998). Despite striking policy inhibitions against even naming it, it is from this overarching political formation that the United Nations’ sustainable development goals implicitly seek to enable transformation (Arora and Stirling 2023; Stirling 2019a). As such, it is the distinctive regressive dynamics imposed by colonial modernity that arguably form the main drivers of social justice and ecological imperatives, which current responsibility agendas are commendably seeking to address.

However this globalising formation is acknowledged or named, a key constituting feature across diverse manifestations (Gaonkar 2001) lies in hegemonically controlling imaginations of ‘progress’ – especially around science and technology (Jasanoff and Kim 2015). Across different settings, these assert the taken-for-granted fallacy that directions for progress (IPSP 2018) must follow paths naturalised as inevitable in particular settings (Stirling, O’Donovan, and Ayre 2018) – as if through a manifest destiny (Nye 1994) defined by whichever innovations are favoured by prevailing interests (Stirling 2010a). Such constrainingly restrictive assumptions offer potent resources to justify and legitimize associated circumstances of privilege and power (Habermas 1976). Perhaps this is why innovation policy discourse – and its client academic literatures – are so routinely coy (and vulnerable to manipulation) concerning the full implications of directionality (Hicken 2011)?

All the more important for being so often marginalised then, a countervailing politics of direction raises high stakes and can be quite catalytic in its effects (STEPS Centre 2010). With developments in particular fields (like biotech, agrifood, computing or energy) routinely oriented by incumbent interests in these settings (Stirling 2008), few interventions are more subversive than pressures for deliberate societal (Ciarli 2022) – even democratic (Stirling 2014a) – steering of directions for change. It is maybe not surprising then, that sectional interests seek to harness expedient ambiguities in emerging languages of direction in order to confuse associated policy debates (Jegen and Mérand 2014). This is why resulting repercussions are arguably so weighty for the present journal concerned with responsibility in innovation thinking and practice (A. Stirling 2016a). If imperatives for responsibility are to succeed in balancing these powerful biases around directionality, then what counts as ‘reasonable’ or ‘appropriate’ in innovation directionality depends on a plurality of normative perspectives (Ziegler 2020) – and neutrality becomes recognisable as an illusion (Turnhout 2022). In the resulting steeply-entangled political gradients, achieving responsible balance requires careful reflexivity (A. Stirling 2016b) and deliberate emphasis (Horton, Kohl, and Kohl 1990).

So: where the full meanings of direction are properly realised, forms taken by innovation can – like progress (Slaboch 2018) and development (Norgaard 1994) more widely – no longer be reified (Geels 2011) as if whatever arises from existing structures of privilege and power in any area is somehow self-evidently unavoidable and optimal (Sveiby, Gripenberg, and Segercrantz 2012). Where issues of direction are taken seriously, a greater plurality of alternative progressive futures (Arora and Stirling 2020) begins to ‘open up’ (Stirling 2008), reflecting diverse critical understandings, democratic contestations and emancipatory struggles (Sustam 2022). Where direction is not taken seriously, these progressive potentialities are shut down.

Aiming to help illuminate these dynamics, this paper will explore important normative, epistemic and ontological aspects of the central focus of this special issue around ideas of direction in innovation. Three interlinked but contrasting meanings typically conflated in these ideas will be distinguished: (a) the directing of innovation (driving processes under given ends); (b) the direction of innovation (steering pathways towards chosen ends); and (c) the directionality of innovation (grasping multiplicities of plural ends). Distinctions between these meanings are ‘polythetic’ (Needham 1975) in that they do not imply fixed category boundaries, but instead a constellation of more complex family resemblances (Wittgenstein 1958) on a number of analytic dimensions discussed in the following sections (Stirling 2023).

In the process of unfolding this analysis, it will first be described how incumbent interests in specific areas join with general pressures for hegemonic closure to blur and curb these meanings. As a result, it will be shown how progressive potentials in current debates about directionality are presently seriously curtailed. In response, this paper will explore practical (but often neglected) analytic, policy and political implications of the above proposed threefold distinction. Here – as already significantly picked up in responsible research agendas (A. Stirling 2016a) – particular relevance arises for the internationally adopted social justice and environmental imperatives of sustainability (Redclift and Springett 2015) around precaution (Stirling 2017), public participation (Smith 2009) and wider democratic struggle (Smith and Stirling 2018). The paper argues that it is only by caring for these political (not just ethical or policy) responsibilities across many areas and levels of research and wider governance (Groves 2013), that the kinds of sustainability transformations (Scoones et al. 2020) may be realised, which are required in order to remedy the presently devastating impacts of colonial modernity (Stirling 2019a).

Pressures shaping understandings about the directing, direction and directionality of innovation

A starting point for this discussion lies in considering details of the deepest political dynamics constituting mainstream imaginaries of progress in contemporary globalising forms of colonial modernity (Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2013). Conditioned by – and harnessing – pervasive aspirations to control (Stirling 2019a), hegemonic language (Nuffield 2012) routinely projects control rhetorics (Maasen and Weingart 2005) asserting innovation as a race to the future (Charteris-Black 2011) along a notionally pre-set track in any given area (Stirling 2009). Despite much cogent criticism (Tarvainen 2022), incumbent policies are thereby defined as generally pro-innovation (Godin and Vinck 2017), with criticism of favoured pathways branded as if indiscriminately anti-science (Stirling 2017). It is of course well known equally to policy practitioners (Aho et al. 2014), technical analysts (NESTA 2011) and academic researchers (Fagerberg, Martin, and Andersen 2013) that research and innovation processes are – even in specific settings – far more complex, multi-dimensional, uncertain and contingent than this controlling language suggests (Flanagan and Uyarra 2016). Yet tensions with hegemonic colonial modern imaginaries as well as inconvenience to more specific interests seeking to suppress critical questioning, often leaves the intrinsic open-endedness of innovation side-lined (GOS 2014).

Alongside their prevalence in everyday practical knowledge about politics, detailed drivers of this neglect are academically well documented (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991). But it is in the nature of these instrumentalising processes, to obscure and suppress healthy explicit understanding and debate about themselves – especially in formal policy (and associated academic) discourse (Stirling 2008). Forces driving such closures of directionality in innovation governance arise from powerful pressures for political justification (Macedo 1990) through which incumbent interests seek to: justify infrastructures (Collingridge 1980); legitimate institutions (Habermas 1976); foster public acceptance (Wynne 1993); cultivate trust (Löfstedt 2005); manage blame (Hood 2011); and engineer wider closure (Stirling 2008) around the particular innovation pathways and associated forms of culture and practice favoured by prevailing interests and normativities.

These pressures are intensified by a dominant calculative style in innovation governance (Stirling 2023a). Yet when this numerical idiom is applied to ‘opening up’ hidden contingencies rather than engineering aggregation (Coburn et al. 2021), challenges of directionality can also be effectively illuminated by quantitative methods (Ciarli 2022). In such a disaggregating mode, calculative (as much as interpretive) analysis can make it visible that innovation is – like progress and development more generally (Norgaard 1994) – better seen as a vector than a scalar (Stirling 2008). This is how innovation displays not just the property of magnitude, but also of direction in an open – inherently qualitative – multidimensional space of possibilities (Stirling 2011). That the constituting of this complex imaginary space is intrinsically open, makes it difficult to impose any single justificatory frame. This raises searching questions for a politics of responsibility about the subjective dimensions and topologies (Arora and Stirling 2023; Stirling 2019b) under which alternative possible directions might be imagined (Jasanoff and Kim 2015).

It is this open-ended feature of directionality that is most significantly potentially progressive in its implications, upholding the need for more open academic and policy attention to the fact of there being alternative possible orientations for progress (Stirling 2009). This applies in practice across diverse areas of provisioning (Fine 2002) – like food (Sumberg and Thompson 2012), water (Lankford et al. 2013), health (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010b), energy (Foxon 2013), resources (Beland, Sandström, and Sténs 2017), manufacturing (NRC 2006), communications (Kalantzis-Cope and Gherab-Martin 2010), mobility (Marletto 2014) and security (Kaldor 2007). In all these settings and more, possibilities for greater attention to ‘opening up’ responsibility can help democratic challenge of typically narrow interests favouring closures around dominant innovation directions in colonial modernity (Arora and Stirling 2023). But this will only happen, if implications of directionality discussed in the following sections are fully articulated and not subverted by instrumental pressures for justification in innovation governance and academia.

This instrumentalization is inherent in the treatment of the most powerfully favoured styles of innovation (like machine learning, quantum computing, nuclear technology, aerospace and biotech) as if these present ends in themselves, rather than selected means to much broader human ends (Smith et al. 2017). For instance, this is how capitalist interests come to drive directionality – appropriating privatised property rights (Rikap 2022), prioritising extractive practices for profit maximisation (Sengupta 2014), and engineering resource dependencies (Alter 2017). Attention to colonial modernity (Stirling 2023c), however, brings into view deeper forces that underpin these strongly orienting motivations (Arora and Stirling 2023). These include ‘the national interest’ (Clinton 1994), coercive security (Flammini, Setola, and Franceschetti 2013), threat of military violence (Adamsky 2010) and various other forms of superiorist othering (Pandey 2024). The imprint of war is a particularly strong feature in large scale politics of direction, that has been especially neglected (Johnstone and McLeish 2020). Such factors are all prominent in contemporary global innovation patterns (Ciarli 2022). Yet they tend to be less openly discussed than values like simple competitiveness or ‘public interest’, behind which they often hide (Schank and McGuinness, 2021).

It is here that more political understandings of responsibility about innovation directionality (Oudheusden 2014), can recognise a deeper and more pervasive background than is normal in traditional preoccupations with ‘the bottom line’ (Makower 2011). Such efforts are reinforced by burgeoning moves within innovation governance (Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe 2012) to appeal to wider necessities framed as ‘sustainability transformations’ (Scoones, Newell, and Leach 2015a). If only as ‘civilising hypocrisies’ (Elster 1999), such frames help open up political space and opportunities for leverage (A. Stirling 2016b) for responsibilities concerning broadly shared ‘sustainability’ values – around human wellbeing, social equality and ecological integrity (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010a). It thereby becomes clear even in elite politics, that – despite huge efforts to cast ‘sustainable innovation’ as about ‘winning’ a ‘green race’ (Fankhauser 2012) – the full salience of sustainability is only poorly addressed in contemporary mainstream innovation governance (Ciarli 2022).

This exerts further progressive pressures to broaden and deepen academic and policy understandings of innovation directionality. Yet despite the high stakes attached to burgeoning discourse around the direction of innovation, the full implications of this challenge remain severely obscured by major ambiguities and misrepresentations about what this idea is all about (Edler and Boon 2018). The rest of this paper aims to help build more rigorous, accountable and responsible understandings of this challenge.

The directing of innovation – driving processes

Different kinds of social and material intractability and inertia make challenges associated with efforts to advance virtually any form of deliberate innovation typically non-trivial (Stirling 2019b). For interests that favour a specific form of innovation in a particular area – like gene editing in agriculture (Vondracek 2019), nuclear power in energy (NEA 2018), or nanomaterials in manufacturing (Roco, Mirkin, and Hersam 2011) – this warrants careful attention to practices for directing innovation (Mazzucato and Robinson 2018). As discussed above, these kinds of action are variously concerned (for instance) with asserting power (Ellul 1964), leveraging privilege (Bauchspies, Croissant, and Restivo 2006), modulating structures (Fisher, Mahajan, and Mitcham 2006), stimulating creativity (Shalley, Hirt, and Zhou 2015), marshalling expertise (Williams, Faulkner, and Fleck 1998), provisioning skills (Jones and Grimshaw 2012), building legitimacy (Geels and Verhees 2011), exercising authority (Whitley 2018), deploying justification (Collingridge 1980), engineering trust (O’Neill 2002) and managing blame (Hood 2011). Without associated efforts at aligning orientations in different kinds of motivating agency and enabling structure, few forms of deliberately-driven change are easy in society (Rindzevičiūtė 2023).

Implicating different kinds of individual and collective ‘structuring agency’ (Stirling 2019b), responsibilities and roles associated with these processes confer a first key meaning in what remain in much innovation literature, currently under-differentiated notions around ‘the direction of innovation’. By analogy with physical motion, such activities help build driving pressures to overcome general societal inertia that typically resists movement in any intended direction. Without such impetus, the course of ‘events’ may unintentionally favour whatever happens to be the emergent proximate drifts (Weber 2005), or tides (Corfield 2007), or background noise of history (Waddington 2021) beyond reach of any deliberate social agency (Stirling, 2019b). Across all aspects, then, this task of ‘directing innovation’ requires alignment (Robinson and Propp 2008) or entrainment (Hanusch and Pyka 2007) of institutional environments to overcome contingent friction. Taken together, all such activities are more about accelerating (Sveiby, Gripenberg, and Segercrantz 2012) some favoured direction for innovation, than consciously steering this among other possibilities (Ciarli 2022).

This idea that the main challenge in innovation governance is that of directing acceleration in some given taken-for-granted orientation can be highly politically expedient for interests seeking justification as discussed above (Kattel and Mazzucato 2018; Schwab 2023). Potentially acting to side-line even the mere imagining of possible alternatives, this constitutes the default focus for innovation incumbents across most fields (Ellul 1980). Analysts, researchers and scholars eager to court patronage or claim their own ‘impacts’ in particular areas, tend to adopt frameworks and methods which further align around the most locally powerfully-given direction (Holmwood 2011). Pressures to adopt uncritically the conventional categories, institutionalised parameters and codified metrics established by and for these interests, exercise further reinforcing effects on the focal hegemonically favoured orientation for innovation (Stirling 2023a).

Despite professing to understand innovation processes as nonlinear (Etzkowitz 2008), complex (Magro and Wilson 2013) and networked (Pyka and Scharnhorst 2009) then, a variety of disciplines typically find themselves emphasising technical understandings that may mention ‘direction’, but which fail fully to engage with issues of directionality – so tending further to entrench an underlying simple one-track metaphor for innovation as a race to advance technology (Broers 2005). Such linear understandings are often deprecated (Edgerton 2004), but their influence cannot easily be denied in specialist analytic frames like advance (Nelson 2008), diffusion (Rogers 1983), early movers (Easterby-Smith and Lyles 2011), first movers (Lieberman and Montgomery 1988), catching up (Silverberg and Verspagen 1995), latecomers (Tellis and Golder 2002), forging ahead (Abramovitz 1986), leapfrogging (Brezis, Krugman, and Tsiddon 1993) and falling behind (Verspagen 1991). All such ideas make sense only under an imagination that research or innovation in any setting is satisfactorily characterised according to a singular focal dimension: ‘forward’ or ‘back’. It is this underlying ontology that – despite disavowals – centres on the essentially linear affordance of a one-track race on a course set by incumbency. What is challengeable in these terms, is effectively restricted to questions about how much?, how fast? or what risk? What is made more difficult by this expedient frame, are questions about which way?, who says? and why? (Stirling 2009).

As a consequence, the single most well-funded and richly-rewarded modalities for discussing issues around ‘the direction of innovation’ tend (despite best intentions) to support the most powerfully-favoured forms of innovation more than others. This is how political-economic dynamics come to the fore, for instance, especially around military domination (Alic 2007), profit maximisation (Rikap 2021), intellectual property (Greenhalgh and Rogers 2010), market share (Jolly 2005), infrastructure rents (Christophers 2020), product synergies (Chataway, Tait, and Wield 2004) and control over supply chains (Tang, Teo, and Wei 2008). Such currently entrenched patterns yield manifest mismatches between relative scales of innovative activity associated (for example) with: genetic more than ecological approaches in agronomy (IAASTD 2009); curative molecular biology more than preventive interventions in public health (Rajan 2017); centralised supply more than distributed service models in energy (Funcke and Bauknecht 2016); hierarchical, segmented, proprietary, more than horizontal open source architectures in computing (Kling 1996); and military projections of mass violence more than institutionalised human security and conflict resolution (Glasius and Kaldor 2006).

Of course, in a complex, diverse and turbulent world, there remain many other less powerfully prioritised drivers of innovation (Smith et al. 2017). Uncertainties (Knight 1921), ambiguities (Manders, Wieczorek, and Verbong 2020), surprise (Brooks 1986), serendipity (Yaqub 2018), manufactured doubts (Oreskes and Conway 2010) and downright ignorance (Loasby 1976) also add to indeterminacy in mapping aims onto realised outcomes (Peters 2006). The most heavily invested drivers (like those mentioned above), will also yield many kinds of alternatively-oriented ‘spin-off’ (Deger and Sen 1983) that may help fulfil values, interests, aims and motivations which contrast radically with those originally driving the initiating innovations (Marquis and Tilcsik 2013). An example might be how open-source, distributed, horizontal, readily-accessible features currently still surviving on the world wide web (Banks 2008) partly derive from more concentrated, hierarchical and secretive military purposes that initially drove the model for the underlying internet infrastructure (Levine 2018). But contrary to mainstream treatments of ‘spin-off’ as if it were disproportionately a quality of incumbent innovation directions (Deger and Sen 1983), positive side-effects may equally easily be imagined counterfactually around alternative pathways too (Ferriani, Garnsey, and Lorenzoni 2007).

Either way, the important point here is that these same multiplicities (A. Stirling 2016b) can lead realised forms of science, technology and innovation typically to bear crucial imprints (Marquis 2003) of the formative environments in which they gestated (Johnstone and Mcleish 2022). For instance, spin-offs (Hambling 2005) from robot (Galliott 2015) and artificial intelligence (Morgan 2020) architectures originally designed for military purposes may tend on balance to retain features concerned with secrecy, hierarchical authority, centralisation of command and rapid projection of force (Coeckelbergh et al. 2018). Likewise, nuclear technosciences enabling militarily-attractive energy concentrations are privileged in applications where alternative more distributed power technologies are otherwise recognised to be preferable (Johnstone and Stirling 2022). Electricity infrastructures configured around scarce localised fossil energy resources often resist adaptations towards harnessing abundant ambient renewable flows (Scrase and MacKerron 2009). Across a variety of sectors, product ecosystems built around capitalist incentives like property assertion, profit maximisation, rent-seeking and market control, frequently find it difficult to assimilate more communitarian, values-driven, non-material services of the sharing economy (Scholz 2016). These everyday but near-invisible realities in the imprinting of technologies intensify under any view, important questions around the directing of innovation.

The direction of innovation – steering pathways

Whatever the values or interests concerned, a major jeopardy to the successful directing of innovation in a complex and intractable world, lies in the variety of ways in which any specific form can be configured, supported or resisted (Stirling 2019b). Even within the most circumscribed of disciplinary, commercial or technical domains, diverse scope for design choice can distract attention and dissipate energy (Stirling 2007). Linked uncertainties can intensify undecidability and competition for resources that challenge the sustaining of requisite momentum (Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe 2001). The same is even more true of those ‘alternative’ directions for innovation that remain less institutionalised in social movements (Smith et al. 2017). Despite the disciplining pressures discussed above to channel and focus resources and attention for the successful driving of innovation, it is often difficult to avoid inconvenient distractions presented by ever-present alternatives at every level of diversity (O’Brien 2000).

Alongside traditional ‘directorial’ preoccupations with one dimensional ‘scalar’ magnitudes like slow/fast, cost/benefit, winning/losing, pro/anti, or accepting/resisting then – as associated with the most powerfully favoured innovation pathway in any setting – this tentatively introduces the distinct ‘vector’ aspects of innovation discussed above (Stirling 2008). The more democratically open the environment in which innovation governance is performed, the more these questions of alternative possible directions for science and technology will come to the fore (Smith and Stirling 2018). Even if attention remains circumscribed around a narrow subset of closely-related alternative paths (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010a), intimations of variety can easily cross a crucial watershed under which innovation must be acknowledged to display the property of direction as well as magnitude. So, arguably the most important consideration across all fields concerns not just the effort of driving forward favoured kinds of innovation, but also the orienting of change itself. It is these dilemmas that form the second – and more political – meaning for the direction of innovation.

Again by analogy with physical motion, this challenge goes beyond overcoming static inertia, to include the steering of vectors of movement in some particular direction rather than others. Unlike the three degrees of freedom available for everyday physical motion, the space of social and material affordances for innovation is far more expansive and complex, encompassing an indeterminate multititude of variously-imagined dimensions and topologies of socio-material possibilities (Stirling 2019b). Here, issues of scope can be approached explicitly normatively in terms of cultural and political values (Schyfter 2009). But they can also be framed epistemically in terms of those analytic parameters that happen to be most dominantly institutionalised and codified in ex ante appraisal or ex post evaluation of research and innovation (Hicks et al. 2015). Throughout wider policy and politics, all of this is further profoundly conditioned in ontological terms, by whatever prevailing imaginations take to be given about those societal or technological configurations that are ‘necessary’ and those which are ‘unrealistic’ (Rip 2012).

This is where the salience arises, of increasingly widely recognised social justice and environmental imperatives associated with ‘sustainability transformations’ (Scoones, Newell, and Leach 2015a). Rising profiles of this agenda have helped commercial and policy understandings to recognise crucial aspects of directionality in colonial modernity that were traditionally neglected in mainstream innovation studies. Yet these still tend to privilege the most powerfully favoured innovation paths and simply ask how might this solution help sustainability? (Stirling 2014a). Against such enduring pressures from powerful interests, internationally mandated ‘global goals’ are helping foster greater formal acknowledgement that mainstream governance should aim not just to apply existing innovations in new ways, but to develop entire new kinds of innovation (Ciarli 2022). Alongside a traditional ‘science based’, ‘pro-innovation’ focus on whatever ‘technological trajectories’ happen to emerge from established ‘innovation systems’, then, growing attention is being given to interrogating default orientations and highlighting possible alternatives.

Examples of these contemporary academic and policy trends towards more actively power-resisting orientings for innovation include key new bodies of practice around ‘discontinuing’ (Stegmaier et al. 2023), ‘destabilising’ (Turnheim and Geels 2013), ‘unmaking’ (Shove 2012), ‘exnovating’ (Davidson 2019), ‘outnovating’ (Joly 2019) or ‘withdrawing from’ (Goulet and Vinck 2012) established innovations. Alongside ‘responsible innovation’ (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013), these can be enacted in measures like those variously styled around ‘nexus research’ (Cairns and Krzywoszynska 2016), ‘grand challenges’ (NAE 2008), ‘sustainable solutions’ (Charter and Tischner 2001), ‘mission-oriented innovation’ (Mazzucato 2019), ‘inclusive innovation’ (OECD 2015), ‘sustainable innovation’ (Wüstenhagen et al. 2008), ‘sustainability transitions’ (Markard, Raven, and Truffer 2012), ‘transformative innovation’ (Scrase 2009), ‘deep transitions’ (Schot and Kanger 2018) or ‘green transformations’ (Scoones, Newell, and Leach 2015b). Examples of concrete novel orientations for innovation that may thereby be promoted include different forms of ‘resilient systems’ (JRC 2015), ‘clean production’ (Kirkwood and Longley 1995), ‘green technology’ (Bensaude Vincent 2014), ‘anthropocene infrastructure’ (Hetherington 2019) or ‘circular’ (Stahel 2016), ‘steady state’ (Daly 1993) or ‘degrowth’ (D’Alisa, Demaria, and Kallis 2015) economy. All these fields of activity are engaged with ‘the direction of innovation’ in senses that go beyond mere driving of established innovation processes, to also include at least some degree of politically-deliberate steering. Yet if taken without reference to a crucial broader context, all such efforts can fall far short of addressing the full plural implications of notions of direction.

Directionality in innovation – grasping pluralities

It is this final crucially plural aspect of issues around ‘direction’ in innovation that is properly addressed by the overarching term ‘directionality’ (Stirling 2009). Once again by analogy with physical motion, resulting implications go beyond discussions concerning either the overcoming of ‘static’ inertia (applying in any given direction) or the orienting of some specific (typically circumscribed) new direction. This third meaning also encompasses processes that are conscious (and so ‘deliberate’) in a far more openly collective sense (Stirling 2019b) – about balancing multiple social agencies concurrently across diverse alternative orientations (Stirling 2007). More than merely driving or steering direction, then, directionality is about grasping the plural milieux in which these might play out (Stirling 2019b). As such, profound implications arise for policy analysis, raising even deeper and more pervasive irreducible political repercussions.

Rather than just navigating some particular contingently-favoured ‘new’ path, then, directionality is about fundamentally pluralising progress (Stirling 2011). This is as much about imagining multiplicities of potentialities (Arora and Stirling 2020) as it is about realising diverse innovation pathways themselves (Stirling 2010b). It is in both these senses, that notions of directionality were originally introduced to innovation studies as being about the ‘grasping’ of pluralities (Stirling 1994, 2009). Here, the idea of grasping is crucial (Michael 2000), referring as much to thought as to action on innovation. Further underpinning this idea, are important process-relational insights due to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (Whitehead 1978). With direct relevance to innovation governance, it is this work that points to the dangers of misplaced concreteness – treating abstract notions as if these are real (Prausnitz 2015).

An example of this can be found where notions of ‘progress’ are idealised in a simple singular unconditional way: as whatever direction for change happens to emerge from existing structures of power and privilege, with other possibilities not only unrealised, but largely unimagined. Such mistaken misplaced concreteness can be found, for instance, where the presumed inevitability and centrality of information technology obscures other political reforms in cities (Marvin, Luque-Ayala, and McFarlan 2016), where gene editing eclipses ecological agriculture (Carey 2019), where biochemical interventions sideline wider public health strategies (Stevens 2004), where planetary geoengineering subverts other climate action (Sapinski, Buck, and Malm 2021) and where nuclear mass destruction is mistaken as a means to ‘security’ (Fihn 2017). In opposition to such blinkering effects, the practical value of this idea of directionality is to reinforce realisations in innovation – as throughout life more generally – that it could be otherwise (Woolgar and Lezaun 2013). Although obvious once made, such reminders can be crucial in helping to resist prevailing forms of directionality failure (Lindner 2016; Weber and Rohracher 2012). Where prioritisations of understandings, values or interests are reified – treated as if set in stone – ideas of directionality can catalyse nurturing and recognition for more diverse epistemic perspectives, ontological dimensions and normative priorities (Rijcke et al. 2015). But where ideas about innovation directionality are conflated with more circumscribed concerns about the ‘directing’ or ‘direction’ of innovation as discussed above, this vital potentiality remains unfulfilled.

This crucial need deliberately to resist the forces seeking to justify dominant directions for innovation can be found even in discussions ostensibly about directionality. One such cue is evident, for instance, in widespread contemporary policy use of innovation ‘roadmaps’ (Phaal, Farrukh, and Probert 2004). At first sight, the ‘map’ idiom encourages impressions that an entire landscape is being grasped in a true spirit of directionality. But on closer inspection, it is almost always found that each such ‘map’ disproportionately asserts just a single one road (Stirling, 2019c). So what actually typically occurs, is that this expansive metaphor is subverted to a highly constraining purpose, away from appreciating plurality and towards the overbearing direction of a particular route (Trim 2011). Thus focusing asymmetrically on a single selected way forward (CEC 2012), ‘roadmapping’ activities (Kajikawa et al. 2008) are par excellence about sending disciplining signals through patronage networks, to coordinate the alignments of academic and policy clients concerning what can be held ‘possible’ (Stirling 2008). Where the apparently open language of ‘directionality in innovation’ is thus (if inadvertently) invisibly captured and closed by incumbent power (Pel, Raven, and Est 2020), the challenge for progressive politics becomes especially intense.

In such cases, policy priorities may emphasise the needs for innovation to ‘transition’ or ‘transform’ in some new direction, but progressive potentialities may nonetheless remain severely curtailed. As in established controlling, colonial modern – one track, race to the future, pro-innovation – discourse discussed above, particular features of implicitly favoured orientations for change can become taken for granted, so obscuring diverse alternatives from view (Stirling, 2019b). Examples of such hidden regressive impacts can be found in extractive modes of renewable energy development (Dunlap 2018) and technological solutionism around plant-based diets (Sexton, Garnett, and Lorimer 2019). In such instrumentalised ‘transitions’, the one-track idiom may seem to offer short-run tactical gains. But the deletion of alternatives is more suppressing than enabling of long-run progressive transformation. All the more potent for being tacit, hegemonic privilege and incumbent interests thereby remain not only unchallenged, but reinforced by ‘no alternatives’ rhetorics around what might be called Lampedusan transformations (Pel, Wittmayer, and Avelino 2019) – in which small things change so that big things stay the same.

To illustrate this, each of the above-mentioned fields can be cited as examples. For instance, despite the radical plurality of sustainable development goals, key frameworks for pursuing sustainability are routinely asserted with the definite article the (Stirling 2014b) – as ‘the transition’ (Geels 2004), ‘the transformation’ (Erlinghagen and Markard 2012), ‘the nexus’ (Urbinatti et al. 2020), ‘the grand challenge’ (Kuhlmann and Rip 2013), ‘the solution’ (Morozov 2013), ‘the mission’ (Mazzucato 2018). Rather than enabling comparisons of diverse alternatives, this emphatic singularity performs two responsibility-eroding political functions. It asserts a general imaginary in which authority and legitimacy around innovation are singular. It then directs this hegemonic force to justifying whatever particular orientation for innovation happens to be most favoured by more specific structures of privilege and power in the setting in question.

Likewise, despite their commendable critical intent, ideas around exnovation (Heyen, Hermwille, and Wehnert 2017) or withdrawal (Goulet and Vinck 2012) can also too easily be allowed tacitly to imply that what count as alternative innovations are self-evident. Again, unless deliberate attention is given to a plurality of possibilities, accountability may inadvertently be lost for the particular interests, values and understandings that favour one possible alternative rather than another. This apparently open focus can operate as a kind of closure ratchet, in which powerful interests can still replace challenging possibilities with disciplined inevitabilities, even where they are not able directly to determine their most favoured direction for change. Where needs remain unaddressed for full, open, careful, democratic comparison of diverse alternative directions for change, an exclusive exnovation or withdrawal focus may still inadvertently be used to ‘direct’ some notionally self-evident way forward. Examples may be seen in contemporary prominence of strategies for climate action that are (like nuclear and carbon-capture) manifestly less favourable than others (Marshall 2016; Sovacool et al. 2020), but where political space for advocacy is afforded to incumbents by a disproportionate focus merely on discontinuing fossil fuels, more than acting on wider and more balanced critical comparisons across alternatives (Stirling 2023b).

Even more so, a similar problem may be identified in currently growing habits of referring to selected instances of innovation as if they were somehow uniquely (Edler and Boon 2018) or more directional (Janssen and Wesseling 2023) than others. Again, this can give inadvertent impressions that direction is a feature only of a particular subset of innovation pathways, with the generally pervasive nature of directionality thereby implied to be less relevant to the status quo. Full implications of directionality can likewise be undermined, when analysts tacitly adopt incumbents’ own normativities, by using the term in ways that imply such questions arise only for critical actors, or that directionality as a whole can in some unconditional way be declared normatively ‘good’ or ‘poor’ (Edler, Kuhlmann, and Helfrich 2023). Whatever the intentions, the tacit effects of such tendencies can be to reify – and so reinforce – whatever happens to be incumbent patterns. Either way, the crucial point is that (when taken seriously) questions of directionality are actually ubiquitous. To suggest that it is only a specific class of pathways that is ‘directional’ fatally obscures that incumbent pathways also display the contingency of direction – a property that is shaped by prevailing patterns of privilege and power.

Further attenuating dynamics of this kind can be found in other apparently progressive contemporary academic and policy discussions of innovation directionality. Around inclusive innovation (Heeks, Foster, and Nugroho 2014), governance (Brown 2002) and transformation (Diercks, Larsen, and Steward 2019), for instance, “inclusion”’ is often discussed with little reference to encompassing conditions of stratified privilege or hierarchical power. In ascending sequence of progressive implications, this kind of framing is typically ambiguous about whether inclusion is: (1) merely about fairly sharing the ‘trickle down’ of benefits from a specific privileged direction implicitly taken as a given; (2) about some involvement in steering a more explicitly decided direction; or (3) about enabling more plural agency towards realising the full progressive multiplicities of directionality (Stirling 2008). Throughout the history of colonial modernity, after all, even enslaved people were ‘included’ (as producers) in the economy (Davis 2014). What matters more than mere ‘inclusion’, are its terms.

Similar dynamics can arise in mainstream sustainability policy, where efforts are made to reduce political aspects of directionality around innovation (Cillo et al. 2019) to a narrower and more technical ‘planetary dashboard’ (Lade et al. 2020) focusing on relatively few simple scalar metrics (Semenova and Hassel 2015). This kind of ‘cockpitism’ (Hajer et al. 2015) again displays the constituting controlling imagination of colonial modernity discussed above, imposing a restrictive impression that (however they may vary materially) all innovation pathways must (to be judged credible) be organised in ways that reflect the singular, centralised, hierarchically-controlling authority that a dashboard implies (Woroniecki et al. 2022). To see that this matters, does not require it to be assumed that such control will actually eventuate. In fact, it is precisely when controlling imaginaries prove false, that they can exert their greatest toll (Tenner 1999). Indeed, it is unintended consequences of technology-inspired colonial modern fixations with control, that arguably most drive the widely recognised challenges of sustainability in the first place (Stirling 2019a). So, the point is, that dashboard-style imaginations have the same tendency to curtail and discipline discussions of innovation directionality as do the more constrained roadmap framings discussed above.

As typically realised in practice, then, prominent forms of innovation governance frameworks discussed here (ie: around ‘roadmapping’, ‘transitions’, ‘transformation’, ‘nexus’, ‘grand challenges’, ‘solutions’, ‘missions’, ‘exnovation’, ‘outnovation’, ‘withdrawal’, ‘inclusion’, ‘dashboards’, ‘responsibility’ and ‘ethics’) can unintentionally mediate suppressive effects on understandings of directionality. In ways described here, they can inadvertently constitute means by which general controlling imaginations of colonial modernity are further asserted – pressuring justification for particular directions favoured by incumbent interests in specific settings and effectively colonising even critique itself (Stirling 2023c). To recognise this is not a counsel of despair. Indeed, it is acknowledgement of this ubiquitous dynamic, that forms one of the single most important steps towards addressing negative effects. Nor does such recognition imply throwing out babies with bathwater. On the contrary, once the unavoidable general reductive forces are identified, through which rich multiplicities of innovation are obscured and closed down, then each of these frameworks may be actively mobilised and pluralised to counter these effects.

The key point is, that it is only through explicit and deliberately political challenges to these powerful regressive syndromes in colonial modernity, that it is possible to enact more balanced approaches to the directing, direction and directionality of innovation. Crucially, balance needs bias (A. Stirling 2016b) – doing justice to these realities needs active sustained emphasis on qualities of equality and plurality (Stirling 2007). If such deliberate balancing actions are impeded by restrictively singular modern notions of ‘objectivity’, or unscientific aversions to explicit normativity, then regressive prejudice and patronage tacitly entrench.

Opening up democratic struggle for responsible innovation

Across a variety of analytic understandings and normative perspectives, the persistently obscured politics of directionality in innovation governance discussed in this article are of profound practical salience. In short, major contributions to these constricting effects are made by:

1. the general distinctive hegemonic controlling imagination of colonial modernity, asserting an instrumental understanding of ‘progress’ as if this were a singular, pre-determined and self-evident quality, amounting to whatever happens to emerge under prevailing structures of privilege and power.

2. the effects of powerful pressures for justification exercised by particular incumbent interests in specific settings, acting to justify those orientations for innovation which they most favour and tending to disadvantage alternative pathways that reflect contrasting, more marginalised, values and interests.

3. a prevailing technocratic style in innovation policy, which privileges ‘reductive aggregative’ practices (including, but not only, quantitative methods). These treat innovation more as a scalar than a vector, helping compound invisibility in issues around direction, so further entrenching incumbent pathways.

In principle, there is nothing inherent preventing these emergent forces applying unintentionally to efforts at ‘responsible’ governance of innovation. Indeed, they may be even more inadvertently regressive when cloaked in these terms. So it follows from explicitly progressive normative motivations that commendably underlie responsible research and innovation (Konrad et al. 2013; Macnaghten et al. 2014; Nordmann 2014; Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013), that more rigorous, equitable and democratic approaches require these powerful obscured closures not just to be deprecated, but deliberately and explicitly countered.

It is to this end, that the polythetic distinction is proposed here between three significantly contrasting meanings that can be identified in contemporary discourses around direction in innovation. These are:

1. ‘the directing of innovation’ – driving and accelerating processes of adoption and acceptance.

2. ‘the direction of innovation’ – steering selected particular possible pathways rather than others.

3. ‘the directionality of innovation’ – grasping irreducible pluralities of possibility in balanced ways.

Only by realising these differences of meaning can it be understood how each of these successively more progressively power-challenging ambitions for the political agency are routinely instrumentally reduced in contemporary colonial modernity to the prior process on which each builds. Pluralities of ‘directionality’ are compressed to steering presumptive necessities of ‘direction’. This closure is in turn further constricted to the ‘directing’ of innovation in whichever particular privileged orientation is taken as a given. In each step of this regress, this article shows how other kinds of instrumentalization also take place: reproducing hegemonic controlling imaginations of colonial modernity, as well as reinforcing incumbent patterns of privilege and power within this. If these processes are not directly and explicitly countered by responsible research and innovation, then such actions may inadvertently become complicit (Hoven et al. 2014).

This is because (as has also been argued), neglect of these political gradients and pressures – or seeking a ‘neutral’ position – inadvertently aligns with the status quo (Horton and Freire 1990). To try to refute this, requires either denial of the property of directionality itself, or of associated deep conditioning effects by power and privilege. Nor does acceptance of this logic imply that power is necessarily held to be bad. The point is merely that power is most likely to be negative under any given view, if it is not challenged (Stirling 2023a). Either way, it is difficult to pretend that directionality and power do not bear on innovation. Since they clearly do, then – under any political standpoint – at least some kind of active governance response is appropriate. There is no legitimate view under which it can be argued that issues of power and directionality may justifiably be ignored.

Yet compelling forces of hegemonic conformity and incumbent expediency help pressurise prevailing academic and policy understandings of innovation routinely to sideline these worldly realities. So established vocabularies reduce salient understandings, by downplaying explicit engagements with power (Avelino 2021) and curtailing meanings even of directionality itself. Modalities are thereby effectively ignored, through which political pressures routinely act on ‘independent’ research. Even some ‘critical’ discourse can neglect patterns of power and privilege acting within (rather than around) science and technology (Stirling 2023b). It is arguably a result of such pressures, for instance, that the global political formation which encompasses contemporary innovation can (despite its direct implication in challenges of sustainability) routinely be denied even a name (Arora and Stirling 2023). Efforts directly analytically to diagnose key features of colonial modernity too easily become dismissed as ‘abstract’, ‘left wing’ or ‘inappropriately normative’.

There are no shortages of political resources to help communities, practices, institutions and movements around responsible research and innovation to seek more faithfully, rigorously and progressively to challenge these syndromes. One potent array of assets lies in the internationally-established normative and legal frameworks with which this paper began, for instance around sustainable development (UN 2015), public participation (UNECE 1998) or the precautionary principle (UNCED 1992). By forming alliances with associated emancipatory interests (rather than allowing incumbent patronage to substitute these or play contrasting progressive interests off against each other), responsible research and innovation can gain crucial traction for efforts to enhance attention and action on issues of directionality (A. Stirling 2016a).

Likewise, there exist many well-developed methods – tellingly also often marginalised (Stirling 2023a) – that directly challenge the regressively reductive and aggregative features of dominant innovation policy practices (Stirling 2003). These include techniques that enable more ‘plural and conditional’ expressions of ways in which findings yielded in both quantitative and qualitative policy appraisal, are routinely highly sensitive to hidden assumptions and conditions (Stirling 2008). Applying these techniques can help ‘open up’ greater political space for assertion of perspectives that are typically excluded by unduly closed, singular and uncertainty-denying notions of ‘evidence based policy’ (Stirling 2014a). This in turn offers to nurture, catalyse, and provoke opportunities for more progressive democratic struggle over the issues at stake around issues of direction in innovation (STEPS Centre 2022).

Specific methods in this regard have been developed in fields like heterodox economics (Loomes and Sugden 2013), narrative operations research (Wilson 2001), interpretive policy analysis (Roe 1994), complex systems theory (Dellino 2015), qualitative information theory (Wouters et al. 2013), participatory practice (Smith 2003) and constructivist science and technology studies (Chilvers and Kearnes 2016) as well as in responsible innovation (Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013). Examples include multicriteria mapping (Coburn and Stirling 2018), do-it-yourself juries (Wakeford 2012), interactive metrics (Rafols and Stirling 2021), precautionary appraisal (Harremoës et al. 2002), sociological elicitation (Grove-White et al. 1997), concurrent evidence (Hondou 2024), Q-method (Stephenson 1953), dialogic accounting (Brown and Dillard 2015) and dissensus conferences (Bouwel and Oudheusden 2017). In appropriate institutional settings (Leach, Scoones, and Stirling 2010a), approaches based around these practices can help more directly to illuminate the potentialities of directionality (Ciarli 2022). All provide chances for ‘plural and conditional’ evidence concerning contrasting ‘reasonable’ innovation pathways in particular settings (Stirling 2008) – and so help open up democratic practice around directionality in science and technology (STEPS Centre 2010).

Transcending more domesticated concerns around ethics (Felt 2008), the irreducibly plural political implications opened up by these methods and practices are often found at the margins of policy-oriented ‘responsible innovation’ (Owen, Bessant, and Heintz 2013) and even mainstream innovation studies (Coburn et al. 2021) – as well as sporadically around ‘transformative innovation’ (Scrase 2009), ‘deep transitions’ (Pel, Scholl, and Boons 2022), ‘sustainability transformations’ (Stirling 2023), ‘sociotechnical destabilisation’ (Koretsky et al. 2023), ‘discontinuation governance’ (Stegmaier et al. 2023), and ‘exnovation’ (Fuchs and Ziegler 2022). But – despite appearances (and genuine motivations) otherwise – treatments of directionality in these broad fields are each more typically constituted by the mainstream syndromes of closure. Where it is not fully realised in the presently advocated ways, an ostensibly ‘critical’ demeanour can (sadly) unintentionally exacerbate regressive effects. In such cases, it can be even more important than in mainstream innovation policy, to ensure that the full implications of directionality are addressed and normal practice is not simply reproduced to the ‘closing down’ of ‘directionality’ to ‘direction’ in responsible innovation.

To resist these instrumentalising pressures, perhaps the most important means by which progressive communities mobilised around responsible research and innovation may do justice to the full meaning and potential of directionality, is arguably to strive explicitly and very actively towards greater democracy in innovation governance (Smith and Stirling 2018; Stirling 2014a; Winner 1992)? Understood in the general sense of access by the least powerful to the capacities for challenging power (Stirling 2019b), democracy is highlighted here more as a perennial distributed unruly process of political struggle (Mouffe 2011), than as a formally settled assemblage of structures and procedures for recognition, representation and consultation presided over by marginally-contending elites (Schumpeter 1976).

Mutually reinforcing with more open policy appraisal practices referred to above, emergent ‘ecologies’ (Chilvers, Pallett, and Hargreaves 2018) and ‘cultures’ (Fischer 2011) of participation can strive to achieve more ‘heterodyne’ kinds of democratic practice (A. Stirling 2016b). These can then pivot, riff and leverage on opportunities offered by the above methods for more plural and conditional innovation politics (Stirling 2008). In resulting variously-styled aspirations to ‘deep’ (Appadurai 2001), ‘participatory’ (Rogers 2008), ‘direct’ (Bookchin 2015), ‘deliberative’ (Reber 2018; Smith 2003); ‘living’ (Fisher and Ponniah 2015); ‘radical’ (Mouffe 1992), ‘pluralist’ (Dahl 1982); ‘reflective’ (Goodin 2003) and ‘do it yourself’ (Lee 2015) democracies, different kinds and degrees of ‘techno-social empowerment’ (Gordon 2006) may thus unfold with regard to directions taken by innovations that affect people’s lives. Either way, if only just as the slogan innovation democracy (Hippel and. 2005), this compellingly oxymoronic evocation of directionality in a field where it is so strikingly neglected, can in itself be progressively catalytic (Rip 1987; Wynne 2002).

So, imperatives for responsible innovation practice actively to highlight issues of directionality, are at least as much about explicit political mobilisation as about policy analysis or impact (Genus and Stirling 2018). If recognised not only as an academic community and a field of policy appraisal, but also as a ‘scholar-activist’ movement (Hale 2008), the highlighting here of the importance of distinctive characteristics in colonial modernity may also assist responsible innovation to engage with many important broadly parallel mobilisations (Arora et al. 2020). Each in their own ways and settings, pluriversal (Escobar 2017) movements around conviviality (Adloff 2022; Illich 1972), uBuntu (Praeg 2014), buen vivir (Vanhulst and Beling 2014), pachamama (Humphreys 2017), eco-swaraj (Kothari and Sangam 2018), radical care (Tronto 1995) and decolonial love (Drexler-Dreis 2018) strongly engage with closely associated challenges. With the opening up of more plurally democratic appreciations for directionality being widely shared political – as well as intellectual – struggles, explicitly normative identifications of responsible research and innovation as a social movement, can itself be a step in emancipatory collective action.

In the end, if analytic and political challenges of innovation directionality are to be met in any scientifically robust and normatively progressive way, then the implications of this analysis are clear and operational. Pervading a wide array of narrow technical and policy responses – but transcending any taken on their own – the remedy lies in continuing plural political struggles towards innovation democracies. Far from being a problem – for instance, as seen from an aspirationally controlling colonial modern cockpit – the vital incongruity, ambiguity, multiplicity, uncertainty, complexity, conditionality and open-endedness of what innovation democracies entail is itself precisely the points. There are plenty of practical means towards these ends.

Whatever such democratic struggles may be taken to mean, if responsible governance of innovation directionality does not also care for its own democratic responsibilities, accountabilities and obligations then it risks betraying imperatives both of rigour and of progressive transformation. If activities around directing, direction and directionality in innovation are to move from conceptual musings to enacted practices, then I hope the cues, distinctions and rationales offered here may be of some assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).