230182 SE Science and democracy: participation, engagement and innovation (2013W)

Today's societies are increasingly concerned with how to foster innovation. Recent interest in policy circles has been on the notion of social innovation as a new kind of innovation focusing more on organization and cooperation, stakeholder and citizens involvement, than on new technical products. Social innovation has its base in the old framework of technological innovation but is said to go beyond a strong divide between the technical and the social. It focuses on multidisciplinary problems that need solutions based in combinations of social and technical innovation, and their co-evolution. Many practices and theories of innovation, even when these are understood as social innovations, however, are still to a great extent dominated by a product-centred view, adopting a narrow interpretation of ‘democratised' innovation.

This seminar will explore different meanings of democratised innovation and public engagement within science and technology studies literature. This conceptual exploration will then be used analytically on a small research project that students conduct in relation to an empirical case of ‘social innovation'. Can we find cases of social innovation that go beyond the strong divide between the technical and the social? How are publics engaged in these processes? What conceptualisations of democratised innovation are in use here?