How And Why We Talk About Innovation
As a leading engineering institution in higher education, Virginia Tech benefits from considerable federal and private sector funding for STEM research. Since the 1960s, the allocation of such funding has been closely linked to prevailing ideas about innovation.
Especially since the end of the Cold War, the dominant ways of talking about and imagining innovation—its discourse—involve strong ties to the management and commercialization of technologies and the advancement of entrepreneurial values over more traditional corporate, professional, and scientific values. Today, “innovation” privileges the individual’s hopes and dreams, and fosters a predilection for risk-taking in the pursuit of generating something new.
This change in how people talk and act highlights the fluidity of the term innovation. Within STEM institutions, innovation often is viewed through an objectifying lens as a definitive entity existing “out there.” What’s less clear is which lenses are used by the larger communities in which self-consciously “innovative” institutions are embedded. This website is one attempt at an answer, based on an exploration of the sites and meanings of “innovation” for folks at and around Virginia Tech.
Especially since the end of the Cold War, the dominant ways of talking about and imagining innovation—its discourse—involve strong ties to the management and commercialization of technologies and the advancement of entrepreneurial values over more traditional corporate, professional, and scientific values. Today, “innovation” privileges the individual’s hopes and dreams, and fosters a predilection for risk-taking in the pursuit of generating something new.
This change in how people talk and act highlights the fluidity of the term innovation. Within STEM institutions, innovation often is viewed through an objectifying lens as a definitive entity existing “out there.” What’s less clear is which lenses are used by the larger communities in which self-consciously “innovative” institutions are embedded. This website is one attempt at an answer, based on an exploration of the sites and meanings of “innovation” for folks at and around Virginia Tech.