Theorists before theories

There is an assumption among scholars that political thinking is a secondorder phenomenon, at best a matter of co-production between policymakers and scholars. This would make it an effect rather than a cause of the theoretical thinking. The documents surveyed in this chapter are witness to the fact that policy-makers produced thoughts on technological innovation that, to varying degrees, preceded and influenced scholars’ representations of innovation in the following decades. Public organizations were among the first to produce titles on “technological innovation†, providing sources scholars could draw from. This chapter reviews three precursor documents on technological innovation that two governments and one international organization produced in the 1960s. In turn, I examine documents from the OECD, the United States and England and discuss a convergence of ideas on technological innovation.