Types, scales, degrees and relevant innovations

The standard view on innovation is high-tech, glamorous, globalised products. But "innovation", i.e. the creative destruction of the worth of dominant ideas, is much more than that.

Here is a recent example of the type of change that is useful to broaden our understanding of innovation: the sort of low-tech, everyday, local and efficient alternatives that people / companies develop in what Bonsiepe called the "periphery":

An African bus, i.e. a bus designed and manufactured in Africa, responding to local needs and conditions.

So, beyond the usual dimensions of innovation (radical-incremental, combinatorial-transformative), we can also introduce dimensions linked to their scale (global-regional-local), and their relevance (market, social, scientific) following the Kuhnian link between paradigm shifts and communities.

This would reinforce the need to classify innovation always in relation to a context. There is no such thing as a universal innovation. Because innovation always transforms someone's life, it is only an innovation in relation to that someone. It may be entirely irrelevant for other people, at other times, and other places.

This is one of the implications of a situated view of innovation.