Anti-Innovation Norms

The event continues and consolidates FBK-ISR’s work on the interactions between religion and innovation in contemporary societies. The talk is open to the public and will be held in English.

ABSTRACT
Anti-Innovation Norms
Innovation scholars have recently turned their attention to social norms—informal rules that emerge from and are enforced by nonhierarchically organized social forces—as a promising way to spur innovation. The narrative that has emerged celebrates social norms’ ability to solve innovation’s free-rider problem without incurring costs associated with other mainstream solutions like intellectual property.
But this account does not fully consider the dark side of social norms. In fact, certain social norms, when overenforced, can create substantial barriers to the most socially beneficial creative pursuits. This talk examines the dark side of innovation norms, coining the term “anti-innovation norms” to label these counterproductive social forces.
Using the double lens of sociology and psychology, I will give a theoretical account of three types of anti-innovation norms: research priority, methodology, and evaluation norms—all of which interfere with socially beneficial boundary-crossing innovation.
The elucidation of anti-innovation norms has implications for both the innovation scholarship and the intersection of innovation and religion. On the one hand, it suggests that even secular communities may adopt a quasi-“religious” adherence to particular scientific and artistic approaches, through the workings of social norms. On the other, the social and psychological forces that drive norms in scientific and artistic communities are also likely at work in religious communities, and may help explain how and why particular religious communities evolve (or fail to evolve) over time.