New sources of radical innovation: research-technologies, transversality and distributed learning in a post-industrial order

Abstract

This study questions the erstwhile claim that the growth of scientific knowledge and successes of radical technological innovation are the consequence of cognitive and organizational differentiation, and that differentiation and integration are antithetic. It is shown that throughout the 20th century many radical technological innovations originated with and developed around generic instrumentation, the practitioners and artefacts of which are characterized by selective and intermittent boundary crossing between academia, industry, state technical and metrological services, the military, etc. However, this mobility is not to be confused with mode 2-like anti-differentiation between science and engineering and between academia and enterprise. The innovative feats of what are here labelled “research-technologies” derive from the capacity to reconcile differentiation and integration, and to secure the division of labour embedded in speciality domains, while simultaneously promoting transverse communication and interaction between actors located in multiple and heterogeneous environments and linked to diverse interests. Research-technologies breed a new constellation of intellectual and institutional transverse dynamics which selectively accommodate both stability and change.