STS and Innovation Studies – some recollections

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Back in 2021, I was invited by Alan Irwin to contribute to a special issue of Engaging Science, Technology, and Society. It appeared on the last day of 2023. This is the open access journal of the Society for Social Studies of Science. The special issue addresses three questions about STS and innovation. Irwin discusses these in the introduction:

  1. When it comes to engaging with and acting upon socio-technical change, is ‘innovation’ part of the solution or of the problem?
  2. How should we view the relationship between STS approaches to innovation and neighbouring fields, especially Innovation Studies (IS)?
  3. What new conceptual and empirical resources can STS bring to the study of innovation (including the possible redefinition and reframing of the term itself)?

My own contribution is called A Journey through STS and Innovation Studies. I reflect on my time at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex in the 1980s, and my time at the University of East London in the 1990s. To complement this, I prepared a photo essay, called Teaching Innovation Studies at the University of East London in the 1990s. I spent time with old teaching materials. The photo essay illustrates how we tried to teach ‘innovation theory’ to a wide variety of students. It is also a visual reminder of how teaching has changed. Back in the 1990s, I prepared hand-drawn overhead sheets and my lecture notes appeared on paper for a dot matrix printer.