5: Re-novation – reimagining regional innovation policy (for better worlds) (Marlise Schneider, Cindy Rentrop, Nadine Osbild, Joakim Juhl, Sebastian Pfotenhauer)
Beyond being a driver of competitiveness and long-term prosperity, innovation is increasingly framed as a tool for social and economic improvement, essential for a better future, and a panacea to both new and persistent challenges. As exemplified by EU-SPRI's 2024 conference theme, it is imperative to assess the implications of how science, technology, and innovation are governed. With innovation being written into national policies worldwide, its promises are shaping future visions on the highest level of power. Innovation policy is frequently modelled after successful clusters, such as Silicon Valley or MIT, that bring together universities, government, and industry. Often, the aim is to rebrand places either ‘left behind’ by former industry (e.g., coal), ‘lagging behind’ other hubs economically, or ‘being invisible’ to the broader political funding and event landscape. Pursuing a seemingly “better world,” these policies promise to resolve issues and boost regions with science and technology, more broadly speaking, innovation initiatives. However, these strategies have come into conflict with local and regional imaginations of the future, which may connect to industrial legacies, and thus, create identities that might disconnect overall local imaginations from innovation.
In this panel, we aim to bring together research on innovation policy and development strategies in “left-behind” and “hidden” regions and how the desire to develop these places economically can overwrite local knowledge and future imaginations. We are also interested in the active negotiation of worthwhile futures in urban spaces that are trying to synergetically combine technological and alternative modes of innovation. Finally, addressing what is underexplored in innovation studies, public policy, and Science and Technology Studies, we look for concrete examples of alternative imaginations of a future and regions that are paving their own way, regardless of, or in direct conflict with, political, top-down strategies enacted upon them. This could include unique local government constellations, low-tech futures, and policies for regions, not ex/implicitly tied to innovation.
Our interests are specifically in asking: innovation for whom, with whom, and by whom? As STS researchers, we ask how we can unpack policies and regional initiatives to better suit the interests of those they impact most. The panel’s exploration of local and regional developments brings new empirical insights on the consequences of contemporary innovation policies that aim to bring regions into global competition. STS work on sociotechnical imaginaries has shown how power is stabilized around chosen technoscientific trajectories. This panel aims to illuminate how similar stabilizing forces generate power structures around visions of progress. This shifts the analytic focus from technoscience to socio-economic factors, where innovation are the means rather than the ends. This move potentially bridges urban development studies, innovation studies, policy studies, and anthropological studies with STS. Analytically, the panel brings attention to the local and regional dynamics that usually remain hidden in national benchmarking and comparisons of innovation policies and political cultures.
Keywords: innovation policy, regional innovation, regional innovation cultures