Science, Technology and Innovation Culture

1 A Brief History of European Technical Culture and Its Relationship with Innovation

1.1. Introduction

What the two historical approaches to innovation and technology have in common are that they both reveal a difference in their emergence and evolution, both factually and conceptually. To invent is a constant in human history. “The innovator is a leader who does not have to act (prattein), he governs (archein) those who are capable of executing”, wrote Plato in Le Politique [ARE 94]. On the other hand, objectifying innovation and building a dedicated culture around it is more difficult than the act of innovating. It is the same for technical fact. Technical fact, tangible and/or intangible, has been a part of the history of human societies since the dawn of time. Nevertheless, human societies do not necessarily objectify the technical fact, even nowadays. Human societies often appropriate the technical fact without developing a technical culture. Actually, the history of the regimes of technical fact appropriation shows the late emergence of a distancing from the techniques [GAR 15].

Let us take Europe as an example. Its material and cultural history experienced profound ruptures between the 16th and 18th Centuries: the first world expansion in the 16th Century, the advent of modern science in the 17th Century and the compelling development of industrial capitalism in the 18th Century. We would expect that such changes would have been made in an innovative mind and that they ...