The Politics of Innovation
Fear vs Care
I must admit, I’ve found it pretty hard going recently to write innovation focused pieces. Amid the scale of suffering happening right now in the world, the specifics of one type of innovation policy approach or another seem such irrelevant issues.
What I come back to though, is that innovation is a part of what is going on in the world, and is a driver of some of the harms we are seeing. Sometimes the links are obvious, sometimes they are obscure, but, either way, they are there.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the political economy of innovation — how it is framed, how it is pursued, and the incentive structures undergirding it.
The process of innovation and the technologies that come out of it are embedded within, and are manifestations of, the economic and political systems that produce them.
The ways we talk about innovation are often taken for granted, but they are worth looking at closer as they can point to some of the systems at play.
Even though innovation discourse is often cloaked in hopeful terms as a path to a brighter future, in reality, it tends to pull on very different emotions. As Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell have argued, much “innovation-speak” is “the rhetoric of fear.”
It plays on our worry that we will be left behind: Our nation will not be able to compete in the global economy; our businesses will be disrupted; our children will fail to find good jobs because they don't know how to code […] Innovation-speak is a dialect of perpetual worry.
This sense of worry, serves to create a seemingly urgent imperative to innovate, and to remove any impediment that might get slow that process down.
This is something Marietje Schaake explores in her book, The Tech Coup. Large corporations often frame their lobbying in terms of how “regulation stifles innovation” creating a “false dichotomy” between the two that treats them as “mutually exclusive phenomena.” This isn’t the case, with regulation spurring innovation (think fuel efficiency as one example). Yet this framing has “commandeered the conversation to turn this dichotomy into near common knowledge.”
This common knowledge is also based on the idea that innovation is always a positive thing that we must pursue as almost a moral incentive. Yet that isn’t true. Many innovations are actively destructive (think Freon creating the hole in the Ozone or leaded fuel poisoning millions of people and creating trillions of dollars in global costs — both invented by the same person.)
Innovation cannot be separated from the political economy we work within. If we focus our energy and attention on addressing Canada’s commercialization challenge and our lagging productivity in ways that seek to grow more Canadian unicorns or increase innovation in corporate Canada, the benefits won’t flow down to normal people. That much has been made amply clear from decades of trickle down economics.
We need to be clear eyed about the moment we live in. Inequality is growing, with the top 20% of Canadians accounting for 65.7% of Canada’s total net worth at the end of 2025, at an average of $3.5 million per household. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% accounted for only 3% at an average of $81,650 per household.
Doug Ford is saying “God Bless the Weston Family” (Galen Weston Jr’s net worth being $20.6 billion) while 26.8% of Ontario children face moderate to severe food insecurity.
The Canadian oil industry raked in $1.5 billion in profits this past week alone — $9 million per hour — and up 3x compared to their profits in February. Meanwhile, the Canadian taxpayer is now going to be subsidizing that profit to the tune of $2.4 billion.
We live in a political economy where innovation is not being pursued for the general good of all, but for the financial gain of only a few.
More innovation, pursued in line with the incentives we have right now and driven by a fear of supposedly falling behind, is only going to exacerbate these issues for ordinary Canadians.
As bell hooks argued, “Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination” and innovation, right now, is often part of that structure.
However, what if instead of innovation driven by fear, we instead pursued innovation rooted in care? Care for our neighbours, care for our communities, care for people across the globe, care for our planet itself?
What would it really mean to design our innovation policies and structures around that notion?
What would that type of innovation system look like?
Ultimately, I bet it would create a very different world to than the one we found ourselves in now.
At the risk of stating the obvious, I would only nuance this post by saying that innovation often leads to company formation which in turn creates jobs. This is trickle down economics at play. I think that for society it's acceptable to have billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg because the companies they founded sustain thousands of middle class jobs.
Scholar of innovation Benoit Godin (RIP) would totally agree. "Innovationism" - the belief that innovation is inherently good, that more is always better, and that societal problems are ultimately innovation deficits. This is where we are at this moment.