Innovation: Within and Between Systems

Innovation is a complex phenomenon which is difficult to comprehend. Innovation researcher in economics introduced therefore the concept ‘system of innovation’ (SI). It started with the notion of ‘national systems of innovation’ (NSI) focusing on country specific institutions in the 1980ies and has been further developed by focusing on interactive learning up to the 1990ies and beyond. The SI approach has been quite successful and is now widely used. Its strengths are the holistic (i.e. systemic) and interdisciplinary perspective; its weakness the theoretical ambiguity. For example, most of the SI approaches emphasize the role of institutions and of learning, but both concepts are differently used. Institutions in SI approaches could mean organizations as well as networks of organizational and individual actors as well as formal/informal ‘rules of the game’; and learning is likewise attributed either to individuals and their creativity or to organizations or to (mixed) networks. In this paper the theory of social systems (TSS) (in the version of Niklas Luhmann) is applied to the phenomenon of innovation. In TSS, innovation is basically defined as an evolutionary process in the interplay between a system and its environment, consisting of variation, selection and re-stabilization. Thereby, (i) variation occurs on the elemental level of social systems, i.e. communication units; (ii) selection occurs on the structural level of social systems, i.e. structures of expectations (i.e. difference to Darwin’s natural selection through the environment), and (iii) re-stabilization occurs when ‘innovated structures’ are compatible with the social system (i.e. do not destroy the social system’s survival, allows for the autopoietic reproduction of the social system). On basis of these distinctions, the idea of ‘system of innovation’ is challenged by the idea of ‘innovation within and between systems’. The focus is thereby on the economic and the scientific system and their interplay.