Special issue in the journal: Creativity and Innovation Management

EXPLORATIONS OF THE NEW
Guest editors: Alf Rehn (Åbo Akademi University) & Christian De Cock
(University of Exeter)

(Flyer downloadable at http://alfrehn.com/cfpexplnew.pdf)

Innovation and creativity, as spheres of academic inquiry, have been a
source of fascination in management studies throughout the history of
the field and have enjoyed a renewed and intensifying popularity in recent
years. The lure of the new and the inherent creativity in the
destruction of the old seem to be endlessly mesmerizing. Areas of study
such as innovation management, entrepreneurship and new product development
all have this affinity for the new as their stock in trade, and thus
innumerable articles and books have been written about new products, new
services, new ventures, new organizational forms, and even the 'new
economy'. Still, there is a specific issue in all this that has received
remarkably little attention, and this is precisely the very category
of 'the new'.

Although we are conditioned to accept novelty at face value, as fait
accompli, key questions about the new – What is it? How can we know it? How
does it come to be? – still remain. And as long as the conditions under
which we can use the word 'new' are seen as self-evident, the philosophical
problem of how something can be truly new, essentially different (or
perhaps not), has not been adequately addressed.

What, exactly, makes e.g. an innovation 'new'? Is it something inherent
to the product or service itself? Is it just a marketing slogan? Is it
something that is born ex nihilo nihil,or a construct created through
the process we call innovation management? Can the 'new' be managed, i.e.
can management play a role in making something 'new'? And is novelty merely
a contemporary issue? These are some of the questions we provocatively want
to put forth with this special issue.

By critically engaging with a concept that has been taken for granted,
become part of the furniture so to speak, we feel that one can both
develop theory and find original perspectives for empirical studies. We
therefore wish to invite a broad range of papers addressing the issue of
novelty in economy and business. Although this obviously allows for a
number of possible interpretations of the theme, we identify four specific
thematic dimensions:

Philosophies of the new

What isthe new? When all things and all concepts in some form, by
necessity, are pre-existing, where does novelty come from? What is the
phenomenological essence of the new? These reflections may serve as guiding
questions for developing a philosophical investigation of novelty. The new
might, as Wittgenstein would probably have it, be just a concept we use
without really needing to define it, a way to play language games. Or, as
Heidegger might claim, it could be something fundamental that speaks of
Being and Time.

Obviously, it has some connection to the temporal, but at the same time
it may speak of our striving for the Complete and the Absolute.

Histories of the new

What is the relationship between history and novelty? Is each new
creation the opening up of history and the creation of a new world? The
study of the new has commonly been linked to the contemporary, but each
novel development is by logical necessity new in a specific historical
context – what was novel in the 1970s seems retro and old-fashioned today.
Conversely, we can perhaps apply an anachronistic analysis of innovation to
product development in eras such as the 1950s or even the 17th century. We
could also explore how the new restructures the past in that it alters the
ways in which earlier achievements are perceived and interpreted.

The sociology of novelty

Arguably, the new is always a social construction. Something is new
because it is in juxtaposition to what was before; that is to say it is new
within a specific set of social facts. Similarly, practices such as
marketing
and politics play a part in positioning things in the social nexus in a
way that makes them 'new' or 'novel'. The social aspect of newness
further extends to the ways in which the new becomes a cultural issue, such
as e.g. the way our contemporary society has made novelty into a moral
good.

The study of how culture defines and/or glorifies the new and of how
the new seems so intricately bound up with the very notion of modernity
also belongs to this kind of analysis.

The language(s) of the new

The various issues described above also permeate our language, and e.g.
analyses of how they are used to discursively create specific realities
could well extend our understanding of novelty. When 'new' has taken on
the role of signifying 'the good' in a progress-oriented market
society, is there anything analytical left within the concept? We live in a
world where almost anything can be described as being new, and where
literature positively brims with references to novelty. After 'Marketing
speak', 'new world orders' and 'the new economy' – is the new just a
linguistic remnant? Has 'novelty' become just a genre?


DEADLINE AND SUBMISSIONS
Please submit your paper electronically to [log in to unmask] The
deadline for submission is 31 March 2005. Papers will be double-blind
refereed.

Guest-editors are Alf Rehn and Christian de Cock, the editorial office
for this special issue will be represented by Klaasjan Visscher.

Manuscripts

should follow the submission instructions of creativity and innovation
management listed on the website. (see:
www.blackwellpublishing.com/journals/caim)

PROVISIONAL TIMETABLE

Submission of papers to guest editors 31.03.05
Sending all papers out for review by 30.04.05
Review deadline 31.07.05
Revisions deadline 30.11.05
Scheduled publication vol. 15, issue 3 (September 06)