Innovation Contested

Benoit Godin's 2015 book tracing the history of the concept of innovation from antiquity to the present — arguing that innovation was for centuries a dangerous term associated with heresy and political subversion before becoming the defining positive concept of the modern economy.

Reveals that innovation's current valorization is a 20th century construction — for most of Western history, innovators were dangerous troublemakers, not heroes — making the contemporary innovation discourse historically contingent and opening space to question whether innovation should always be valued.