The innovator who thinks they have no choice

I have spent years working on responsible research and innovation. I believe deeply that responsibility matters. I have built methods and frameworks precisely around the idea that science and technology should be developed differently, with greater attention to social and environmental consequences and with a diversity of stakeholders.

But the more I work in innovation systems, the more I wonder whether the problem is not only the absence of responsibility frameworks, but also the kind of innovators these systems produce.

One of the most striking ideas developed by Xavier Pavie in L’innovation à l’épreuve de la philosophie[1] is precisely that innovation does not merely suffer from a lack of ethics. It suffers from a lack of freedom.

This may sound abstract at first but it’s not.

Because responsibility and freedom are inseparable. One can only be responsible for actions that one is genuinely free to choose. If decisions are entirely dictated by external constraints, then responsibility becomes blurred. At some point, we stop asking individuals to think morally or politically. We merely ask them to execute.

And if we look honestly at how innovation systems operate today, this is often what happens. Most innovators do not experience themselves as people making choices. They experience themselves as people navigating constraints. Funding priorities, quarterly objectives, industrial competition, technological race narratives, market expectations, investor pressure, publication incentives, institutional hierarchies: the space in which decisions can actually be made often feels extremely narrow.

Which choices are allowed

The result is not necessarily cynicism. Many researchers, engineers, founders or entrepreneurs genuinely want to contribute positively to society. But the system continuously reframes what counts as a legitimate choice. Certain questions become obvious (scalability, performance, market fit, growth potential) while others progressively disappear from the discussion entirely.

Who does the technology actually benefit? What forms of dependency does it create? What ways of living does it normalize? What environmental costs are rendered invisible because they happen elsewhere? And the biggest of them all: Should this technology exist at all?

These questions rarely disappear because individuals are malicious. They disappear because the system makes them difficult to sustain.

This is where Xavier Pavie’s argument becomes interesting. His point is not simply that innovation should become “more ethical”. It is that innovators themselves must change. In his words, innovation requires a form of “conversion”. Not a religious one but a cognitive and philosophical one.

Because if innovators perceive themselves as having no real choice, ethics becomes mostly decorative: a discourse added afterward to decisions already structured elsewhere. This is visible in the way many technological trajectories unfold. Once a field becomes economically strategic, the logic of acceleration tends to take over. Innovation becomes a race nobody claims to control anymore nor question.

A new innovator posture

And yet it is possible to break with this logic. Xavier Pavie gives the example of GE Healthcare and the development of a frugal electrocardiogram device initially designed for low-resource settings. What matters in this example is not the product itself. It is the fact that the initiative reportedly emerged from R&D teams who considered the lack of access to healthcare technologies unacceptable. The project was not initially driven by market optimization. It started from a social issue. Interestingly, once developed, the device also proved relevant in markets that had not even been targeted initially. The economic value followed the relevance of the solution rather than preceding it.

This may sound anecdotal, but it points toward something larger: innovation systems often assume that social concerns are constraints imposed onto technological development from the outside. In reality, they can also be starting points for invention itself. Pavie develops this idea through what he calls innovation-care: an approach to innovation grounded not only in efficiency or user experience, but in attention to interdependencies. Not only customers, but workers, ecosystems, vulnerable populations, non-human life, future generations. In that sense, it goes much further than the now-classic rhetoric of “human-centered design”, which often remains narrowly focused on users, often with purchasing power.

The difficulty, however, is that such an approach requires time, attention, doubt, and collective deliberation: precisely the things contemporary innovation systems tend to compress.

This is why the philosophical dimension matters. For decades, thinkers such as Hannah Arendt or Hans Jonas have warned that technological societies progressively separate action from responsibility. The scale and complexity of modern technical systems make consequences difficult to perceive, distribute responsibility across long chains of actors, and create situations where individuals participate in dynamics they no longer control.

Innovation is therefore not only a technical issue. It is a question about the kind of human beings institutions encourage us to become. Do innovation systems produce individuals capable of judgment, restraint, and responsibility? Or do they primarily produce actors trained to optimize within systems whose goals are never questioned?

The problem is not simply that innovation lacks ethics committees, impact metrics, or better governance frameworks. The deeper issue is that many innovators are structurally discouraged from exercising political and moral judgment in the first place.

The question is therefore not only how to regulate innovation differently. It is whether we are still capable of producing innovators who believe they are allowed to choose differently at all.

[1] Xavier Pavie, L’innovation à l’épreuve de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France, 2018.