PROSPERA

What levels of technological complexity can we reach in a non-growing economy?

The feasibility and desirability of endless economic growth is increasingly being questioned by scholars and activists. While envisioning alternative economic models is key to assure the sustainability and wellbeing of present and future generations, few studies have analysed what might be the role of ‘innovation’ in a post- growth era. Innovating has become the imperative for the survival and expansion of any form of organisation. But this ‘innovate or die mania’ underpins assumptions – such as technological determinism and productivism that neglect the socially constructed character of technological development, its politics and its capacity to enable just and equitable societies but also dystopian technocratic futures. PROSPERA posits that untangling innovation from growth is key to imagining a post-growth era. If growth is going to be unsustainable, we need new narratives for innovation that would accordingly also have to change and increase the scope of the innovation concept itself, beyond technology, into cultural and institutional change, and indeed social life and social order. PROSPERA attempted to address the following questions, rarely asked by management and organization scholars:

• How organizations would look like in a different paradigm, in a system that is not based on and doesn’t not rely on endless growth?
• Under which conditions STI without growth would be able to flourish?
• What levels of technological complexity can we reach in a non-growing economy?
• What policies, infrastructures and organizational forms are needed or are more likely to facilitate this new paradigm of STI?