Understanding regional innovation cultures: A comparison of five German city-regions and their adoption of global innovation "best practices"

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Sebastian Pfotenhauer
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 393633367

There is a growing sense that innovation - and innovation studies - are facing a crisis. On the one hand, innovation as a public discourse and imperative for regions and institutions is more prominent than ever. On the other hand, the geography of innovation is thoroughly unequal. Repeated failures to spur innovation in so-called developing regions have revealed the limits of theorizing innovation along traditional lines of universal models (e.g. National Innovation Systems) or best practices (e.g. Silicon Valley). Many parts of society feel excluded by the prevailing technocratic and elitist innovation approaches and consider the global innovation discourse a threat to their identity. At the heart of this problem is the persistent inability of innovation studies to seriously include local social and cultural factors into mainstream theory, leaving policy-makers and the public hanging with the task to enact innovation initiatives in culturally appropriate and socially robust ways.This project aims to develop the concept of Regional Innovation Cultures to better account for local sociocultural differences in innovation theory and associated public policy. We propose a three-year comparative study of five German city-regions - Berlin, Dortmund, Dresden, Karlsruhe, Munich - to investigate how each imagines the purpose, mechanics, and limits of innovation differently.Analytically, we put the tension between the supposedly universal mechanics of innovation and the unique local sociocultural contexts of implementation front and center. In each region, we aim to trace the reception and adoption of three best practice models of innovation (MIT, Silicon Valley, Responsible Research and Innovation) to show how implementations of the seemingly same model lead to diverse outcomes as they align with specific local visions, rationales, and identities. Our analysis thus flips the notion of Best Practice Transfer on its head: Instead of asking how well a region has implemented an innovation model, we analyze the differences in how city-regions re-envision themselves through innovation in keeping with their local culture.Theoretically, our study draws on the co-productionist strand of science and technology studies (STS) and, specifically, the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries to theorize innovation cultures. Empirically, the project represents the first qualitative, comparative study of innovation in Germany, carried out in collaboration with local partners. Based on the theoretical and empirical work, we seek to strengthen the normative, political, and epistemic underpinnings of innovation studies. This will provide important insights about the generalizability of local practices and experiences, and offer new inroads for inclusive and democratic governance in innovation. It may also shed light on fading public trust in politics and societal institutions, especially the role of innovation expertise, innovation governance, and visions of globalization.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants