Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 44

The anthropology of innovation clearly shows the complexity of the process of change, which requires simultaneous shifting through geographical mobility, through mobility over time with history, and through mobile knowledge depending on the scale of observation (Desjeux 2018). To innovate is to transgress, to take risks, either to be dismissed or marginalized depending on the situation. This shows that innovation is not given and therefore explains the importance of constraints as drivers of innovation.

Today, with global warming, the risk of pandemics or war, the question of innovation is being reversed. Since the 18th century, i.e. since the beginning of the coal age, the industrial revolution and consumer society, most innovations have been organized around five objectives: simplifying uses through industry, chemistry and fossil energy; saving time; spending less human energy by using industrial energy; increasing productivity and thus the quantity of goods consumed; and finally paying less by lowering the costs and prices of goods consumed.

With the new constraint of sustainable consumption, innovation must help to limit the quantity of goods consumed and increase their durability, which often increases costs and prices, which thus contradicts innovation processes that have been going on for more than two centuries. Some innovations, such as cooking more from fresh products, increase the mental burden of some social actors, mainly women at home. Some of these innovations contradict the purchasing power constraints of the lower middle classes, even if none of this is automatic. Innovating today requires changing the reasoning and methods of the innovation processes that have been organizing our societies for 250 years.