The foundations of innovation in modern societies: the displacement of concepts and knowledgeability

Our paper offers a contribution to the growing literature on the sociology of innovation rather than the still dominant economic theory of innovation. We suggest that innovation first and foremost represents a process of cognitive displacement whereby existing metaphorical frameworks are reconstituted to account for new phenomena in a process that changes both the metaphor’s and the new phenomenon’s compositions. We suggest that integral to this process is knowledgeability, or a bundle of social and cognitive competencies that emerge as one of the main prerequisites for innovative thinking. We conclude by examining the most important social and cognitive competencies that structure the possibilities for invention and innovation in the contemporary knowledge economy. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013