Analogy of the philosophical foundations of systematic and transformational innovation discourses

The contemporary world is facing numerous, momentous and intertwined environmental, technological, economic, political, and cultural challenges. In this regard, in the last two decades, scholars have developed social, environmental, sustainable, responsible, inclusive, mission-oriented and challenge-oriented policy approaches to expand the policy discourse of transformative innovation in response to the shortcomings of the systematic innovation policy discourse. However, the distinction between the philosophical foundations of the discourses is relatively hard; therefore the divergence of research is extremely likely due to the ambiguity in the scope and precise theoretical definition of the alternate discourse. On the other hand, despite the theoretical development, transformational policymaking has not been very popular among policymakers due to its unknown nature. Therefore, this article aims to identify the equivalent, differentiating, and exclusive aspects of systematic and transformative innovation policy discourses. In this regard, based on the systematic background review method, first, the keywords of the discourses were searched in the Scopus database and 2401 English journal articles were identified. Then 42 articles were selected based on the title, abstract and content filtering and were studied to extract the philosophical foundations of the discourses. Based on the findings, the dependence of the innovation trajectory on the regime, participation based on the impossibility of centralized policymaking, and diverse and evolutionary selection were identified as the equivalent features. Also, attitudes toward the role of innovation (key position in economic development against the lack of social and environmental development with technological progress), typology of the required innovation (within the system versus beyond the system), the policy intervention rationale (system failure versus transformation failure) and the level of policymaking (emphasis on the national level against the multi-level approach) were suggested as differentiating factors. Finally, non-market, institutional, and social development, non-linear approach to innovation, and the inherent lack of optimality were identified as the exclusive dimensions of systematic innovation discourse, while the necessity of a normative approach toward innovation, attention to both development and destruction, and radical change in gradual stages were recommended as the exclusive aspects of transformational innovation discourse.