Published June 11, 2025 | Version v1
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Residues that matter: Why innovation societies need to rethink their response-ability

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  • 1. Department of Science and Technology Studies, University of Vienna

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This essay critically examines the consequences of the evolving role of innovation in contemporary societies, where it functions as both a normative imperative, an economic driver, and a policy blueprint for addressing global challenges. Framed through discourses of competitiveness, sovereignty, and resilience, innovation is increasingly pursued as an existential necessity. Drawing on insights from Science and Technology Studies and empirical material from the ERC project Innovation Residues (Felt, 2021a), the essay argues for reading innovation in reverse—not through its promises and envisioned futures, but through the material, infrastructural, and epistemic residues it leaves behind and collateral futures they create. These long-lasting traces, often rendered invisible, offer an alternative vantage point that challenges linear narratives of innovation-driven progress and invites more critical assessments of an innovation's value and impact. It interrogates the limitations of existing responsible innovation frameworks, particularly their relatively narrowly framed focus on one-time, early-stage, and input-centric interventions, and advocates a conceptual shift toward spatiotemporal geographies of response-ability. Stressing the need to develop "arts of noticing" innovation's many residues, the essay outlines an expanded concept of responsible innovation that is more attentive to what endures, accumulates, and is often neglected. It proposes a more reflexive, situated, and care-oriented approach to responsibility—one attuned to innovation's long-term impacts and uneven futures.

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