Novation

Aims & Scope

The international journal NOvation – Critical Studies of Innovation , was launched to contribute to the rethinking and debunking of innovation narratives in academic and practitioner fora , corporate circles, and policy-making milieus. The journal questions the current narratives of innovation and sets up a forum for discussion of the different discourses and practices of innovation, extending those interpretations beyond its virtues to also consider its implications. NOvation publishes annual thematic issues, composed of 6-10 articles around aggregating themes proposed by Guest Editors, usually introduced by a 'positioning' paper and/or editorial note. The journal also has a section of critical reviews of referenced books in the focus and/or scope areas of innovation studies. Putting together several scholars across at least three continents, NOvation is in itself proof of an urge to open the field of innovation studies and other interdisciplinary –and every disciplinary– areas engaged with STI discourses. New generations have been bold in internationalising their practices and contributing to a broader kind of inter-cross-disciplinary problems and interpretations. Like this, our Editorial Board is encouraging co-authorship between disciplines, promoting special issues with guest editors, in subjects that debate different areas and engage the innovation field with new and more critical generations. We should emphasise that there is now a younger generation of researchers, more open to this view than the mainstream researchers and scholars are, frequently entrenched as the latter are in University chairs or established research institutions, whose agendas tend to be shaped according to policy agendas. In fact, from the very beginning, "innovation studies" has been a policy-oriented field. Otherwise, there are indeed many scholars who do not recognise themselves in that normative orientation, at the same time being critical of the current system of bibliometric validation and ready to publish in this Journal. There is a need to look critically at innovation studies presented as the unavoidable path to scholars and experts and get better pictures of innovation than the one this field has been used to. This Journal questions then the current narratives of innovation and offers a forum to discuss some different interpretations of innovation, not just its virtues but also its implications. In this sense, NO refers to the non-innovative behaviours, which are as crucial to our societies as innovation. Failures, imitation and adverse effects of innovation, to take just some examples of non-innovation or NOvation , are minimised and rarely form part of innovation theories. The following topics comprehend this journal scope of interests and critical approaches: - Deconstructing theories and models of innovation; - Deconstructing the discourses proposing, idealising and selling them; - Confronting diverse ontologies of policy and development with rational innovation models and other views of officials and development agencies; - Not just deconstructing, but also constructing different models and proposing alternative narratives. Besides, the areas that NOvation calls to collaborate represents an interdisciplinary field with many disciplinary and thematic affiliations – Economics and sociology of innovation, History of Science and Technology, Conceptual history, Intellectual history, Public Policy, Institutional History, etc. –, with a wide scope of methodological possibilities: Critical analyses: from and on studies of innovation, being those approaches more disciplinary or interdisciplinary; Discourse analysis: deconstructing actors' rhetoric, policy-makers frameworks and scholars' theories and argumentation; Intellectual history: documenting scholars' theories and trajectories; Conceptual accounts: studying the concepts used in the field, the travelling of concepts among fields (academic and public) and their transformation into catchwords; Case studies: helping to understand and mapping the uses of innovation and to rethink current narratives. The critical study of innovation is essential because innovation as a word is everywhere in contemporary societies. Innovation is in the political discourses, cultural and knowledge debates, and the political economy of nowadays global economics. It is not for the sake of being against it but to make up for the lack of empirical basis that the pro-innovation bias has. We are indeed interested in understanding "why innovation is (un)important' in connection to other categories of human agency contributing to progress", or put in other words: understand 'why, where and when' innovation could be– or not be– important to progress and development of human endeavour in different contexts and regions. Adopting a critical stance and studying innovation not from a performative place, that's our challenge to innovation studies communities across the globe. Indeed, the field of innovation studies is normative and programmatic. People like

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Subject Classification