A Situated Cognition View of Innovation with Implications for Innovation Policy
From Meritology
Author's Abstract
Herbert Simon, in his 1968 Karl Compton Taylor lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Simon 1969), introduced the notion that there should be a science of those things that human generated in addition to the science of those things that occurred naturally. He called this the Sciences of the Artificial. The science of innovation and innovation policy falls squarely into Simon’s purview of the artificial. Like all sciences the science of such artificial constructs as innovation and innovation policy must commence with the recognition that there are phenomena to be observed and studied and about which testable hypotheses need to be generated and tested. If such hypotheses survive testing and are shown to have adequate predictive capacities they may be elevated to the status of theories. Scientific research into innovation and innovation policy is still at an early stage where there is not yet full agreement on what all the phenomena are, there is not an adequate set of testable hypotheses and the theories are still being developed rather than the outgrowth of tested hypotheses. This is not unusual in immature sciences.
This chapter presents the view that one of the reasons for the current state is a lack of a sufficiently wide ambit in our understanding of the various phenomena that go to make up innovation and not simply immaturity.
As is usual in immature fields there is a lack of an agreed ontology for the field and as a consequence there is a lack of agreement on the terminology used to describe all the phenomena. The terms “creativity” and “innovation” are often conflated and this causes confusion. In this chapter we will distinguish them as follows: creativity is a process that produces novel, unexpected and useful ideas, often simply called “creative ideas”, which may be multiple forms ranging from intellectual property in research papers and patents through to prototypes. [...]
This chapter presents the argument that one phenomenon that has not been adequately accounted for in many approaches to innovation is the changing understanding of the producers and adopters of the creative idea and of its resulting innovation and the interaction of the creative idea and the innovation with the understanding of the adopters. This can be captured by taking a cognitive view of the processes involved.
Resource: [1] Author: John Gero Title: A Situated Cognition View of Innovation with Implications for Innovation Policy
