Impactful Innovation: Symbol of a New Era, But Not the One We Think

Examining the recent and late emergence of the concept of “impactful innovation”, which appears tautological (innovation implies adoption, which implies impact) and is linked to environmental and social issues that have existed for decades, and noting the appearance of multiple forms of innovation (open, participatory, user-driven, etc.) that appear to contradict the dominant paradigm of innovation as primarily carried out by large companies, this article posits that the concept of “impact innovation” is a sign of a radical transformation of the innovation paradigm, as well as of the underlying economic system. Driven by digitalization, two concurrent phenomena – prosumerisation and platformization, have fostered a new era in which social capital rather than financial capital has become the key resource, and innovation, now collective and distributed, involves multiple stakeholders, many of whom are not motivated by financial considerations, but by impact instead, making “impactful innovation” an absolute necessity.