An inclusive notion

Having defined technological innovation as the commercialization of goods, what remains is to study how technological innovation happens. Two concepts serve this purpose - process and system - traces of which are present in the policy documents studied in Chapter 7. The one - process - postulates that technological innovation starts with pure science. The other - system - is a contestation of this belief, insisting that technological innovation is a whole and scientists are only one part of it, and certainly not the initiating actors. These two concepts define two approaches that serve to make sense of technological innovation. I distinguish between approach and theory here. Theories of technological innovation are discussed in the next chapter. Here I document the genealogy of the approaches that guide the theorists. An approach is a conceptual framework or discursive and programmatic device that provides a vision and a storyline or narrative to interpret the world (Braun, 1999; Fisher, 2003).