General Theme: The demand for sustainability is omnipresent in various discourses across the globe. Politics has to be made in a sustainable manner, ensuring long-term financial balance of national budgets; companies have to rethink their businesses in a sustainable manner, using less resources while providing secure employment; consumers are urged to buy “green” or “ethical” and shift their habits of mobility, eating, clothing, and leisure time behavior. Sustainability is thereby just as much a fashion fad, a newly dominant power discourse, a marketing tool, just as it is a real necessity on a finite planet.
The favored road to sustainability in all its discourses is innovation. The vast majority of decision makers in politics and business adhere to the belief that by introducing novelty – new product development, technological breakthroughs, new institutional instruments, and also new social arrangements of how to consume or how to organize for a more sustainable democracy – the problem of non-sustainability of current circumstances can be solved.
However, every increase in efficiency by the introduction of novelty induces a rebound effect — Jevons’ paradox. The direct rebound increases demand for the novel good, while the indirect rebound is stemming from increased possibility in alternative consumption. Both effects directly lead to economic growth and largely destroy ecological gains through innovation. The triangle of innovation, sustainability and growth is paradoxical and its dissolution poses what Heinz von Foerster called an “undecidable question.”
After dealing with social and technological aspects of innovation in the past years, the 2012 International Conference on Innovation Concepts and Indicators – 20 years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro – focusses precisely on this undecidable question.
The conference theme tries to address, not answer, this question from three different perspectives:
1. Sustainability and innovation: How to make sense of their interrelatedness, imbalance and connection on a conceptual level?
2. Sustainability of innovation: How can innovation processes, social innovation arrangements and contexts, and innovation output made more sustainable?
- Sustainability as a demand in the innovation process
- Measuring sustainable innovation output
- Opening or closing innovation for more sustainability
- What is a sustainable innovation?
3. Innovation of sustainability: Using sustainability itself as an innovative and innovation-spurring concept.
- What constitutive factors of sustainability have the power to change our understanding of innovation?
- How do sustainable innovations differ from non-sustainable innovations?
- Can there be such a thing as a sustainable innovation?
We invite paper abstracts and workshop proposals dedicated to but not exclusively limited to these perspectives with focusing either on theory, empirical research or real-world application.
Paper abstracts: Extended abstracts of 500 words, detailing the specific problem the paper will target, how the author/s want to solve it and what the benefits of the solution are to the issues addressed in this conference.
Authors of accepted abstracts will be asked to provide a full paper of 6,000 (Minimum) to not more than 8,000 words. Both abstracts and full papers will be double-blind reviewed and best papers will be selected for publication with an international publisher after the conference.
Workshop proposals: Proposals should consist of not more than 500 words. We seek to discuss the issues of sustainability and innovation in a broad and in-depth manner. Workshop proposal need to focus on one of the three perspectives and a specific theme within the problem complex in sustainability and innovation. Such themes could be:
- Social Innovation and Sustainability
- Sustainable Consumption and Production
- Sustainable Technology Development
- Societal Change and Transformation towards Sustainability
- Sustainability Science and Theories
- Politics of Sustainability and Governance
- Civil Society and Sustainability
Important Dates:
Extended deadline for paper abstracts and workshop proposals:
May 15, 2012
Notification of acceptance / Registration opens:
June 1, 2012
Early bird / Registration deadline for presenters:
September 15, 2012
Final program:
September 15, 2012
Full papers due:
October 15, 2012
ICICI 2012:
November 22-23, 2012
