BINGO ! INNOVATION !

« Innovation is the action of innovating; the introduction of novelties; the alteration of what is established by the introduction of new elements or forms. Innovation is first attested in a legal context with the meaning of introducing something new into an established thing. »
(Oxford English Dictionnary)
According to the Encyclopédie of Diderot and Dalembert, « innovation is a novelty, or important change that is made in the political government of a state, against the use & the rules of its constitution. These kinds of innovations are always deformities in the political order. » For the philosopher Pierre-Damien Huyghe, innovating can be understood as the action of « putting something new into something », in other words, to introduce something new within a process.

This is the central meaning of the word : alterating the chain of operations, but not necessarily the result of these operations.
For instance, innovation in the inflation of a tire will result in finding a new way to inflate a tire, but won’t necessarily modify the paradigm of the inflatable tubed tire. This is what distinguishes innovation from invention. The injunction to innovate does not require to question the result, it only requires to question the process, the mechanism. What innovation demands of us is to change the operating chains. What innovation asks us to do is to put novelty into our know-how. What is affected by innovation is how to perform, regardless of the nature of the performance, which remains unquestioned.

What does an innovation bring of really new in the world, since it is fundamentally not interested in the result ? And what does an innovation erase from this world, as it actively participates in the replacement of ever existing satisfying abilities and knowledge ?

We should remember that techniques are not only a set of means to achieve something, but at the same time the means to prevent the realization of something else. When discussing technologies and innovation, we should highlight the function of exclusion of techniques and their foreclosure of future options. In many cases, it is as important to know what can not be done anymore because a given technology has been set up, than to know what technology can do.