Innovation assessment: probing the future

This paper, written in honor of Paul David, explores the need for a new “assessment” discipline, called innovation assessment (IA). Such a new assessment discipline is needed as innovation has gradually disconnected itself from primarily technological based breakthroughs to broader social and organizational change issues and as a result seized progressively more or less all fields of economic policy. Contrary to the old field of technology assessment (TA), which involved ex ante technological experimentation performed in engineering laboratories, IA should consist of ex post observation and evaluation following ideally the full deployment of the innovation in the economy. As a result, IA will be a more complex process creating many policy dilemmas and trade-offs, some of which were already at the center of Paul David’s writings in the late 80s, in particular what he called the “Blind Giant dilemma.”