Directionality of Innovation and Development

This chapter is focused on the question of directionality of innovation and development. This question has been recently debated with reference to justice of emerging technologies. Contemporary innovation theorists tend to defend a combination of Schumpeterian and Keynesian politics of innovation as a solution to the problem of directionality of emerging technologies towards socially just outcomes. In contrast, Hayekian theorists of innovation insist that top-down state interventions in the free market, aiming at directionality, suffer from epistemological and moral problems. The chapter argues that what really matters for the direction of innovation towards social justice is to introduce non-ideal principles (from the bottom-up and the grassroots innovation movements) and related democratic politics which don’t reproduce unequal social relations but instead try to equalise them through appropriate level of distribution of risks and rewards of innovation and development.