Understanding regional innovation cultures: Narratives, directionality, and conservative innovation in Bavaria

In recent years, innovation policy has increasingly embraced “situated” perspectives to better account for both how culture matters for innovation in diverse settings and how to deal with growing socio-economic inequalities and conflicts in the global innovation landscape. In this paper, we develop the framework of “regional innovation cultures” to put these perspectives on more solid theoretical footing. Regional innovation cultures refer to unique ways in which regional innovation initiatives and technology developments (their goals, meanings, material organization, and actor constellations) are being brought into alignment with local identities, socio-economic legacies, and unique political cultures. Our framework foregrounds five analytic dimensions: imagined social orders, representations, political cultures, relationship to national and global initiatives, and local controversies. We apply this framework to one in-depth regional case study of the German state of Bavaria, focusing on innovation policy in three sectors: space, agriculture, and automotive. We show how Bavaria enacts what we call a “conservative innovation culture”, where innovation is framed as a way to preserve socio-economic orders rather than disrupt them, and where political and economic incumbents forcefully shape and absorb emerging niche activities. Innovation in Bavaria is performed through a political culture of small state-like corporatism that emphasizes strong coordination of all major actors, grants state bureaucracies a key role in defining directions for innovation in the form of a quasi-technonationalism, and tends to sideline alternative visions and voices for innovation. Across all three sectors, culture serves as a framing device to legitimize innovation primarily as an extension of existing social orders; conversely, innovation serves as a vehicle to reinforce dominant ideas of the public good. Through the lens of culture, innovation ceases to be primarily a source of social change and disruption, but can be understood as a mode of socio-cultural reproduction subject to tentative, constrained experimentation. Innovation initiatives cannot break too radically with existing social norms and orders without risking public support or legitimacy, thus creating a trade-off between proposing novelty and ensuring continuity. Our analysis lends further support for constructivist approaches to innovation studies, emphasizing plural and socially grounded perspectives on the rationalization, implementation, and evaluation of innovation.