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The relationship between society and innovation is emblematic of the history of a tumultuous relationship.

Innovation was initially perceived negatively because, as Plato suggests, it calls into question the established order and leads “without anyone noticing, youth (…) to despise what is old and esteem what is new (…) it is the greatest evil that can befall any state” (Plato 2013, pp. 2679–2680)³. As Benoit Godin (2014) points out, this conception of innovation would last for centuries. Can we find a better illustration than the definition given in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie where innovation is defined as a disease “These kinds of innovation are always deformities in the political order” (Joncourt 1751, in Huyghe 2013)?

From the 16th century, however, innovation has been symbolic of a break with tradition, a break even more understandable because innovation is based on the idea of progress. From the end of the 16th century, Francis Bacon and René Descartes, for example, associated the progress of knowledge with that of technology and the progress of technology with the progressive improvement of living conditions for humankind. Indeed, technological progress is considered by René Descartes as the vector for the conception of a new “Garden of Eden” in which misery, illness and even death can be excluded, building on human genius (1966).

This vision of Progress, with a capital letter, we might say, culminated in the Age of Enlightenment, a century that could be considered as the moment of the victory of Progress against retrograde obscurantism. A century in which man would no longer endure the course of history but become the subject of history by taking God’s place in the order of creation and participating in the design of the world in which he lives. A century in which faith in the capacity of humankind to act through reason would prevail, to concretize moral and social ideals in the real world, which would lead to the development of Saint-Simonianism in France. Indeed, this post-revolutionary doctrine initiated by Saint Simon saw in the rise of industry “a true project for society, capable of allowing a policy favorable to the public interest and generating true social peace” (Ménissier 2016), leading him to affirm that the golden age of humanity was before us and not behind us.

History seems to agree with such a vision of things because, in France a century later, the Belle Epoque consecrated the advent of a period of prosperity sustained by the greatest wave of discoveries and innovations in history, a time when the sense of innovation continued to be seen through the prism of progress oriented by a political project: the increase in the happiness of humanity.

However, the 20th century marked a decisive turning point. At the beginning of the century, the belief in Progress collapsed and led, through the advent of the relationship between innovation and economic progress⁴, to a shift from a concept of innovation for society to that of innovation for business. The entry into the era of the consumer society opened up a process of “massification of the production of innovations” (Forest 2020). This process is not unrelated to market saturation, combined with exacerbated competition, which today condemns many companies to innovating simply to tread water. This observation may seem trivial, but it is not, as it helps us to understand that innovation, whatever its nature, has changed its status over time. In the majority of cases, it is no longer considered as a project at the service of society, but an end in itself, intended to anticipate the offers of potential or existing competitors; i.e. emphasizing the strategic meaning of innovation for the company and underrating the meaning of these innovations and the relationship we have with them. This observation is even more worrying as the shift from the meaning of innovation to that of a meaning of company-oriented innovation was combined, on the consumer side, with the idea that the increase in the consumption of innovations is connected to that of our well-being⁵, even though the correlation established between innovation and happiness is an illusion.