General context

For several decades, the innovation literature has increasingly used adjectives to describe new ways of innovating: frugal innovation, responsible innovation, low-tech innovation… All these models seek to rethink innovation practices so as to combine socio-environmental challenges with economic imperatives.

What if, ultimately, rethinking innovating were not about finding a new label, but about accepting that we operate in a complex and multidimensional world; a world in which tensions, contradictions and paradoxes coexist, without necessarily having to resolve them, but rather bringing them to light in order to think through these dualities?

This is precisely what the special issue of Innovations, “Rethinking Innovation? Reading Major Transformations Through Tensions,” proposes. Rather than adding yet another qualifier, it chooses to embrace these tensions as constitutive dynamics of any innovation process, rather than as anomalies to be corrected. Rethinking innovation would therefore be less about choosing one side than about finding ways to enable, over time, the coexistence of logics that may initially seem difficult to reconcile. Such a perspective is rooted in the organizational paradox literature, according to which tensions never truly disappear: they are recomposed, displaced, and must be managed rather than definitively resolved. It also resonates with process perspectives on innovation, which focus on the dynamics of organizational transformation.

Four generative tensions

Drawing on the contributions of the authors in this special issue, the guest editors identify four tensions that currently run through innovation practices.

The first tension is between performance and impact. It concerns trade-offs between economic objectives and societal and environmental requirements. It lies at the heart of contemporary debates about the purpose of innovation: is innovation intended to increase performance, to address social and environmental challenges, or to try to hold these two imperatives together? This tension is explored in a particularly original way through a reflection on sustainable frugal innovation, showing how trade-offs between environmental quality, affordability and sustainability can themselves become sources of innovation. By mobilizing the emerging concept of the environmental quality/price trade-off, the authors propose an analytical framework for understanding how certain forms of innovation are positioned at the intersection of environmental requirements and economic constraints.

The second tension concerns openness and control. It refers to trade-offs between sharing and protecting the resources mobilized in innovation processes. It raises the question of how organizations can benefit from access to external knowledge, skills and resources while preserving their ability to coordinate and appropriate the value created. Fundamentally, it raises the issue of resource governance, particularly the governance of information resources. This is illustrated through the case of agricultural data governance, where data are considered as information goods. Such data become particularly sensitive when they can be valorized, shared or reused, creating risks of appropriation and value capture by actors that possess the technical, organizational and legal infrastructures required to exploit them. How can a sector benefit from data sharing without losing control over those data, or allowing the value created to be captured by the actors best equipped to exploit them? Such questions take on new significance in the study of data- and artificial intelligence-based business models. They illustrate how contemporary digital transformations are redefining the boundaries of innovation and organizations’ capacities to design, recombine and evolve their business models. Issues relating to ethics, sustainability, data sovereignty and platform dependence also show that these new models are accompanied by growing tensions in governance, appropriation and responsibility.