The relevance of Innovation for Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability

In the fall of 2015, a call for papers was issued on ‘The relevance of Innovation for Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability’, as a follow up of the rich and interesting debates, which took place at LUISS during the 2015 DRUID Summer Conference on this topic. A few conference participants were invited to submit their papers for publication in this special issue, but also external contributors were invited through the open call. This special issue thus presents the most interesting contributions on innovation seen from a social perspective, together with key outcomes from the conference itself. Traditional innovation theory suggests that economic growth and technological change are strongly interlinked, where on the one hand economic progress elicits new technological trajectories, and on the other hand new technological breakthroughs contribute to the creation of new markets and wealth (Dosi 1982). However, more recent studies have identified how innovation and the commercialisation of related products often translate into inequalities as economic growth does not homogeneously spread across portions of the population, and we are seeing increasing inequalities both across and within nations, between different social categories (George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012). These inequalities bring with them a social cost, driving differences in health and mortality, as well as in education and crime (Neckerman and Torche 2007) thus reducing or eliminating the possibility for entire portions of the population to contribute with their skills and creativity to the creation of wealth (George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012). In order to reverse these inequalities and produce a more balanced society, a new movement is gaining increasing momentum, with the objective of integrating the principles of Ethics, Responsibility and Sustainability (ERS) in the discourse on firm’s competitiveness, economic growth and technological progress, with specific attention to the social impact of firm-level economic choices.