ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the dominant everyday understanding of “innovation.” It discusses the simplistic approach to economics and its flawed policy orientations. The neoclassical and mostly neoliberal economic mainstream, or orthodoxy, reflects both an old religious and early bourgeois-philosophical ideal of an autonomous, decentralized, spontaneous, stable, self-equilibrating, and “optimizing” mechanism. In the neoclassical birth period and again later, in the Samuelsonian mathematization period of the 1940s, economic orthodoxy particularly tried to draw parallels to the formalism and reputation of physics, and in flawed ways. Technological change or innovation could, in that simplistic frame, always only be conceived of as “exogenous” and erratic. “Exogenous shocks” then only cause comparative statics from one equilibrium to another. In both basic possibilities agents’ cognitive capacities have a bearing on their subjective willingness to remain open to change, i.e., their attitude and proclivity to be innovative in a broad sense.
