Alexander Peine

Steering with big words: articulating ideographs in research programs

Nowadays, science should address societal challenges, such as ‘sustainability’, or ‘responsible research and innovation’. This emerging form of steering toward broad and generic goals involves the use of ‘big words’: encompassing concepts that are uncontested themselves, but that allow for multiple interpretations and specifications. This paper is based on the premise that big words matter in the structuring of scientific practice and it empirically traces how three ‘big words’ – ‘sustainability’, ‘responsible innovation’ and ‘valorization’ (a term closely linked to knowledge utilization) – steer research activities within a Dutch research program of nanotechnology that is explicitly related to societal challenges. To do so, the theory of articulation is extended with the concept of ideographs. We report on how the top-down steering ambitions of policy are countervailed by the bottom-up dynamics and logics of researchers. We also conclude that when ‘big words’ are used in an organizational and administrative setting, it changes their effects

Rejuvenating Design Bikes, Batteries, and Older Adopters in the Diffusion of E-bikes

Old age is not normally associated with innovativeness and technical prowess. To the contrary, when treating age as a distinct category, policy makers, innovation scholars, and companies typically regard younger people as drivers of innovation, and the early adoption of new technology. In this paper, we critically investigate this link between age, ineptness, and technology adoption using a case study of the diffusion of electric bikes in the Netherlands. We demonstrate how, during the first wave of e-bike acceptance, old age was constructed as an arena in which important learning processes took place, and where older persons became early adopters of e-bikes. Theoretically, this paper speaks critically to the prolific literature on innovation diffusion and its treatment of adopter categories as generic concepts. Using age as a central dimension, our research highlights the situated and constructed nature of adopter categories, and thus challenges age-based assumptions about innovation and technology use by younger and older persons. These insights about what we term the rejuvenation of e-bikes help us rectify existing biases of older persons as an inherently problematic group of technology users.

Challenging Incommensurability: What We Can Learn from Ludwik Fleck for the Analysis of Configurational Innovation

This paper argues that Ludwik Fleck’s concepts of thought collectives and proto-ideas are surprisingly topical to tackle some conceptual challenges in analyzing contemporary innovation. The objective of this paper is twofold: First, it strives to establish Ludwik Fleck as an important classic on the map of innovation analysis. A systematic comparison with Thomas Kuhn’s work on paradigms, a concept highly influential in various branches of innovation studies, suggests a number of pronounced yet under-researched advantages of a Fleckian perspective in the context of technological change and innovation. Secondly, the paper links these advantages to some recent changes in the organization of innovation. Due to the rising pervasiveness of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), configurational innovation has become commonplace that cuts across the boundaries of established trajectories of knowledge generation. Fleck’s graded understanding of the closedness of thought collectives and his weak notion of incommensurability provide powerful metaphors to grasp the peculiarities of configurational innovation.

Valuing Diagnostic Innovations: Towards Responsible Health Technology Assessment

Diagnostic innovation is increasingly perceived as an institutional interplay with many heterogeneous stakeholders in which users are more proactively involved in diagnosis. This challenges traditional Health Technology Assessment (HTA) practices, focusing on efficacy, safety, quality, and costs. Other values become important in diagnostic innovations, including social and ethical norms, expectations, positions, and distributed roles of stakeholders. This chapter asks which set of values, which logic of valuing could be leading in such new practices of HTA for diagnostic innovations. It zooms in on the current logic of valuing in HTA. It presents various empirical cases reporting on diagnostic innovations, and reflects on how HTA strategies, policies, and interventions for practitioners and users of diagnostic innovations could be more flexible and responsible.

From niche level innovations to age-friendly homes and neighbourhoods: a multi-level analysis of challenges, barriers and solutions

ABSTRACT Age-friendly housing is an envisioned solution to enable people to live longer independently at home, thereby reducing costs of long-term care and responding to the needs and demands of older persons. Although different age-friendly innovations exist, they fail to realise scale beyond the niche level. Based on workshops with stakeholders from different European countries we show that challenges and barriers for scaling-up relate to the unknowns and uncertainties of the culture (age-friendly housing vision), practice (approaches to realise age-friendly housing) and structure (organising and structuring elements) of the age-friendly housing system. Solutions are merely informed by the perspective of the own professional practice and might fail due to their mismatch with other practices and by not considering the resilience of incumbent regimes. Establishing a multi-actor process to start defining the culture, structure and practice might result in a cooperative and distributive effort to realise age-friendly homes and neighbourhoods.

Innovation and aging — toward a bi-directional perspective

Aging is among the most striking societal changes that highly industrialized economies face. While a number of related challenges, such as the increasing pressure on social security systems, are being widely addressed by policy makers, the consequences of demographic changes for innovation systems and processes have surprisingly not been a major research topic. The implications and challenges of demographic changes for innovation remain a puzzle for public policy-makers, managers and civil society alike: While aging calls for innovative solutions to help solving some of the societal problems associated with demographic changes, it still remains unclear, whether aging societies may prove to stay as innovative as today. To be able to provide innovative solutions, companies have to understand changing demand and consumption patterns in aging societies in order to remain competitive. And policy makers have to foster conditions under which innovators can meet the demands of an aging society. This is crucial for both, companies in order to remain competitive, and societies in order to improve the facilitation of individual aging.