Abstract
“Innovation” has joined the pantheon of normative buzzwords tossed around to elevate or repudiate cities and regions and the economic development paths they set for themselves, or more often, find themselves set on. Cities and regions are judged for the robustness of their “innovation systems.” Local institutions, firm networks and supply chains, and even labor markets are assessed for their “innovation capacity”—a shorthand for the ability of people and places to absorb or “uptake” new technologies. Within all this continuous evaluation is an assumption that we all hold a shared understanding of what innovation is and further that this shared understanding sits within a near universal acceptance of a Schumpeterian view of growth and change. That is, creative destruction results in winners and losers. You do not want to be a loser economy. And winners form an exclusive club.
Acknowledging that this discourse about local and regional economies centers an inequitable form of winner-take-all innovation—“exclusive innovation”—is a vital step toward imagining and enacting possible alternative futures. Yet articulating, much less winning, a battle to define and assert a competing vision of “inclusive innovation” requires more than we can ask of local and regional economic development as it is currently constituted. By definition, “inclusive innovation” is an aspirational vision for economic development that is not present in our current practices. But there are signs of this aspiration. And these signs can serve as a foundation for constructing a new model. These articles begin to show us both where to look for this emerging model and what to look for. And perhaps more importantly, they demonstrate that alternatives are not only theoretically possible but also actually existing.
A key question we see is how to give these alternative ideas, practices, and discourses the status of fully fledged models to rival the narrower visions of innovation currently in circulation: How can inclusive innovation become commonsense enough that practitioners “know it when they see it”? The challenge is both technical and—uncomfortably for many in economic development—political. For the forces that make the ground state for innovation so inequitable are the same forces that make our broader world so.
The articles in this issue identify a dizzying number of barriers to inclusion. They range from old-fashioned sexism enforced through misogyny, to hidden gender inequalities present in networks, to occupational hierarchies valuing managers and ignoring the insights of shop-floor workers, to policy makers and politicians consistently defunding or ignoring programs and institutions that focus on people and places marginalized from the standard innovation model.
Simply put, exclusive innovation is socially and politically constructed rather than economically inevitable. However, even this partial list of all the ways that exclusive innovation is embedded can overwhelm any effort to unpack these processes and renegotiate the terms of the debate or the elements of the practice of economic development. And that is very much the point: Acknowledging the full breadth of the forces dictating exclusive innovation throws into unusually stark relief the perennial economic development challenge of using modest and fragmented local resources to steer national and global forces.
The efforts chronicled in this special issue are by definition elements of the larger task—a point to which we will return shortly—but they point to concrete and useful advances in our thoughts and actions. Individually and collectively, these pieces offer meaningful guidance on a range of innovation problems. We label them the practical problem, the stability problem, and the politics problem. The contributions to this special issue point to concrete and practical near-term improvement to each of these problems. Those improvements, however, are by definition inadequate to the bigger task of create systemically inclusive innovation. The more lasting contributions of these articles come from the progress they make toward that larger task.
The Practical Problem: Inequality as Competitive Inefficiency. Like any significant political-economic change, creating inclusive innovation over the long-term will require a social movement. In the short-term, however, advocacy for inclusive innovation benefits from the reality that innovation’s current inequalities damage everybody. This builds a critical mass of constituencies receptive to reform. Motoyama and co-authors’ piece (2021) on women entrepreneurs begins with the simple, irrefutable insight that ongoing sexism and generalized gender imbalances in entrepreneurship limit the pool of risk-takers entrusted with delivering innovation and new economic futures for troubled places. Bramwell’s (2021) comparative analysis of formerly industrial St.-Étienne and Greensboro likewise reminds us that even successful programs to expand participation in innovation fall short of the formidable need to bring new people into the process. North of the border, we see that Ontario’s failure to foreground social fairness in entrepreneurship consigned makerspaces to places and economic segments that did not really need them—that is, those on whom the exclusive model of innovation already centers (Vinodrai et al., 2021). Finally, Lowe and co-authors’ (2021) compelling narrative of an innovative manufacturing improvement program documents the rampant waste and inefficiency created by manufacturing education and production systems that discarded the innovations of front-line workers.
Each chapter shows us that opportunity—and with it, leverage for inclusion’s advocates—lies at the center of such rampant waste. In every instance, advocates for fairer economies gained a foothold by promising to solve the practical problems inequitable systems create. The results are not transformative, but they are highly effective: With the exception of the to-be-determined response to unequal access to Ontario’s makerspaces, practitioners in each case used inequalities to secure institutional backing to bring new people and voices into the innovation process. These results provide a powerful reminder that critiques of inequality are never just theoretical. Each presages a viable response for those who promise to follow the connective threads.
The Stability Problem: Unreliable Support Undermines Complex Programs. Economic development planners usually attempt to solve problems in the same way that scholars claim to answer research questions: By identifying the ideal goal (or question) and working backward to find the resources (evidence for scholars, programs for practitioners) to get there. This framing belies a rather less elegant process, at least for scholars. In practice, research studies begin with a dataset, from which research extracts the most interesting and substantial argument. This raises the question of why practitioners do not work the same way, by determining the most substantial programs they can extract from the institutions and resources available to them.
The pieces assembled in this special issue strongly support this latter, nontraditional approach: Across four distinct interventions in regional innovation systems, we encounter programs that are precisely as capable and effective as the institutions that enact them. St Louis’s entrepreneurship programs valorized women entrepreneurs but lacked the means to overcome basic barriers to access. The ambitious job-training schemes chronicled by Bramwell worked where the state made a stable commitment (with resources) to supporting a program and failed where funding was partial and unstable. Funding for Ontario’s makerspaces made no provisions for minority inclusion and as a result achieved none. Finally, initial failures and shortcomings in the Illinois Manufacturing Excellence Center’s (IMEC) Genesis initiative were overcome by a determined funder using its resources to enable the organization to adapt the model over time.
Program success cannot be reduced to institutional capacity, of course, but theory and evidence alike support the idea that stable institutions lead to better practice (Clark, 2013). The cases assembled in this journal suggest an important addendum: Institutional capacity and stability may be more important for achieving inclusive innovation than they are for realizing other economic development goals. Converting the waste of exclusive innovation into a more equitable and efficient form of practice requires negotiation and communication, both of which are likely to break down in the absence of institutions with the authority and mission to keep participating parties at the table. In each of the cases, the number of moving parts essentially guaranteed the need for an entity charged with overseeing the big picture.
In Motoyama’s study of St Louis entrepreneurship programs, the barriers to female entrepreneurship fell outside the bounds program directors expected—academic study was needed to determine the problem, and the contributions of research to program design will depend on the funders communicating results to participants. Similarly, Ontario’s makerspaces failed to reach diverse populations because nobody was in charge of the job, and Greensboro’s inclusive innovation program struggled due to consistent change in institutional support. The exception of Chicago’s IMEC proves the rule—that program likewise appeared to fall short of its goals at first. However, manufacturers gradually took program ideas on board because the organization had sufficient time and stability to adapt its approach to bring them back to the table. It is easier to imagine programs working this way, with a determined supporter steering attention to inclusive innovation, than through the conventional means of drawing up programs regardless of the capacities of the institutions involved. There is much to say about these different approaches in both theory and practice, and serious discussion is at a minimum overdue.
The Politics Problem: Inequality is Bigger than Economic Development. Finally, these pieces provide a reminder that we need theories from beyond economic development to make sense of the problems currently facing the field. The ideas of inclusive and exclusive innovation bring clarity to the sometimes maddeningly complex processes linking places, new products and technologies, economic growth, and economic equity. However, focusing on the mechanics of individual innovation programs necessarily pushes us to scrutinize the figurative trees over the forest. The programs these pieces investigate provide precise but marginal improvements to inequalities that ultimately require transformative solutions.
Readers may think of this as a scale problem if they like: No matter how carefully worked they are, it will always be difficult to see a viable path from these particular programs to region-, sector-, and economy-wide interventions that make innovation less destructive and more democratic. In closing, we wish to draw attention to the need for theories that scale in the same way. The number of factors shaping success in these programs will make the reader dizzy: gender norms, real estate markets, finance, national policy, shop-floor relationships, working conditions, and access to business networks—we could go on, a fact that points not to shortcoming in scholarship, but rather to the size of the problem before us.
The scant amount of work that attempts this large task points to both problems and solutions beyond those typically considered in this journal. On the one hand, it is increasingly clear that failing to make regional innovation both high-functioning and equitable in the short term magnifies the problems places face over time. Rodriguez-Pose (2018) points to political instability in “places that do not matter,” while Spicer (2018) documents the roots of authoritarian regimes— the largest obstacle to inclusion, with or without innovation—in global rustbelts. Recent work by Clark (2020) points to the long-term threat of uneven innovation as a mode of uneven development, one in which both poorer regions and the poor within wealthy regions will be increasingly marginalized. Politics is an uncomfortable subject for economic development practitioners trained to think technically. It is also unavoidable and increasingly urgent. The stance of disinterest is increasingly difficult to maintain when political turmoil and revanchism blow up so many programs and policies.
Conclusion: The evolving practice and underdeveloped theory of inclusive innovation
In recent years, some think tanks and policy shops have begun to talk about “inclusive innovation.” This construction often signals a performative rather than substantive nod toward acknowledging the systemic and structural exclusion of underrepresented and marginalized people and places in the winner-take-all game of capital accumulation driven by uneven innovation. But, somewhere beyond the branding is a real notion of an innovation process that is not built on creative destruction but instead on a model of sustainable, equitable, and incremental innovation. A real notion of inclusive innovation that does not mistake the merits of disruptive innovations for product markets for a desirable (or ethical) development strategy for cities and communities. The point is direct: We can do better.
Fortunately, these articles point us toward some of the building blocks needed for starting the task of building an effective model of inclusive innovation. First, scholars and practitioners alike have an obligation to continue documenting the contributions of inclusive innovation to creating better-functioning local economies by redressing inequalities. As the old saw goes, data are the plural of anecdote. The programs explored in this volume represent just a sliver of the relevant work currently underway. Adding to the inventory of counter-examples and alternatives is a critical first step for any effort to build a comprehensive model of inclusive innovation that can rival the taken-for-granted qualities of exclusive innovation—whose fruits you are likely using to read this article!
Second, if exclusive innovation has roots in an unequal society and inequitable institutions and political systems, then building a counter-model requires us to have empirical inputs that reflect the diversity of the barriers (and solutions) to inclusive innovation. Exclusive innovation works, after all, by positing a simple, one-size-fits-all model—innovation in a box—that need not take into account social difference, political power, or the limits to managerial and technocratic skill. The project of inclusive innovation can benefit from recognizing it is not just a mirror image of the current regime, but rather a more diverse, nuanced, and context-specific endeavor. This requires, well, more diversity, nuance, and context: continued attention to gender, but also to race and immigration; a focus on instances where actors excluded from ordinary economic development intervened to make programs and institutions more equitable; examples from overseas, the Sunbelt, shrinking cities, and America’s new boomtowns. The project of inclusive innovation needs a lot of fuel from a lot of places. It is up to us to fill in the many gaps to the model.
Third, and finally, advocates for inclusive innovation will need to make the case for their project more effectively—with greater detail, better evidence, and more carefully selected comparisons than the current default case for exclusive innovation. Like the realization that an inclusive model cannot simply reverse the exclusive model, this is not an easy task to acknowledge. Yet, we cannot afford to deny the obvious truth of the situation. The singular, problematic case of Silicon Valley remains the unquestioned reference point for the status quo in innovation, despite the patent ridiculousness of transmitting its putative lessons to Cleveland, or Sheffield, or Baltimore. If scholars and practitioners want to displace this with a more realistic, detailed, and functional model, they will need a strategy to overcome the comparatively heterogeneous, nuanced vision they champion. This could entail championing a counter-model to Silicon Valley. It almost certainly requires comparative work that demonstrates the feasibility of particular equity interventions for certain types of places.
We can think of few such paradigmatic insurgencies to look to for models, but one underlying feature of successful alternatives is clear: They begin their case with facts, but they win support by providing better, more appealing, more resonant theories. 1 As scholars, we have plenty to say about the research project in front of us, but most intellectual projects do not ultimately lack for empirical detail. Few of us, for example, can claim to have read more than a small fraction of the thousands of research articles written about clusters. The case for clusters rested not on detail but on its authorizing framework of human capital theory. Today, the case for inclusive innovation has an ally in the rising tide of human development theory, which casts social inequality as economically wasteful in addition to normatively distasteful. The reader can insert her own preference here, but the underlying point remains unchanged: Just as remedying inequality requires addressing problems that lie outside the narrow bounds of what we call “economy,” winning the case for inclusive innovation will require appeal to a broader theory and locating innovation within the social differences that stunt it.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
