The Innovation Conundrum

Dominant cultural assumptions about innovation, often bound in cycles of hype and reflexive jargon, assume omnibenevolence, focused on how to perpetuate innovation, incubate it, and celebrate it. Questioning innovation often seems antithetical to our culture’s esprit de corps, as evidenced by Bill Gates’ Davos 2016 speech : “People who say they don’t see the acceleration of innovation is a willful blindness. We are innovating at a wonderful speed for the basic things we think everyone should get.” Beyond the allure of innovators and innovativeness and innovation mindsets, however, is a complex landscape: the rise of innovation hubs in areas of growing economic inequality; the rise of the knowledge economy at a time of predominantly service‐level employment opportunities; and the promise of technology as a tool of liberation when most systems with which we engage regularly require our reliance and impose control of use.