Society push – the key to sustainable innovation

Citation

(2006), "Society push – the key to sustainable innovation", International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, Vol. 7 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijshe.2006.24907daf.001

Society push – the key to sustainable innovation

Society push – the key to sustainable innovation

From various socio-economic and cultural points of view, today's clash of norms and values in several public domains is high on the political agenda. This on-going debate in public very much overlooks the relevance of distinguishing between social and personal norms. As long as social norms are not being internalized into personal norms, the desired behavioural consequences will continue to restrict themselves in yea-saying, which also constraints the realisation of sustainable consumptive behaviour.

Since citizen's growing understanding that the consumptive consequences of sustainability are imperative, innovation should no longer be geared by technology push as induced by legislative measures and/or by the consumptive trends at the marketplace as a reflection of consumer needs (market pull). Instead, as the key driver for sustainable innovation, one has to prioritize on the implementation of sustainable needs as expressed by citizens – the society push.

It will be inevitable that governments, NGO's and industry have to remodel their thinking far more into the direction of the internalisation of social sustainability into citizen's personal norms. Above all, Governments should commit themselves to prepare youngsters to their future role of responsible consumers, by embedding social sustainability in the learning programmes of formal education, from primary school onwards. By this, the concept of the society push anticipates on this shift away from a rigid technocratic society (the Lisbon scenario) towards the flexibility of a creative economy (the Florida scenario).

Within the context of the EU framework programmes it has been established that science and technology are not the automatic drivers of change. In the context of converging societies and sciences towards a knowledge-based society, all research in the framework programmes should have a social science and humanities component. Consequently, for the forthcoming 7th EU Framework programme a separate financing is foreseen for socio-economic sciences and the humanities (SSH).

To be prepared for future 7th EU Framework calls, an international and multidisciplinary intellectual consortium of representatives from “soft and hard” science institutions is anticipated. Intentions to participate in the network of a SSH Centre of Excellence as in formation can be forwarded to: j.barzilay@imrcons.nl