Benoit Godin

French-Canadian historian of science and innovation at INRS Montreal who wrote Innovation Contested — tracing the history of the concept of innovation from its pejorative beginnings (innovation as dangerous novelty) to its current positive status — demonstrating that innovation's valorization is recent and contingent.

Shows that 'innovation' was for most of Western history a pejorative term — innovators were disturbers of order, religious heretics, political subversives — and that only in the 20th century did it become a positive concept, revealing that our current innovation worship is a recent ideological construction.