Anticipating Techno-Economic Fallout: Purpose-Driven Socio-Technical Innovation

This special issue is dedicated to several themes encompassing techno-economics and socio-technical innovation as related to public interest technology (PIT). The techno-economic paradigm underpins the innovation-based theory of economic and societal development [item 1) in the Appendix]. In the June edition of the IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society, Abbas et al. [item 2) in the Appendix] wrote about the motivation for invention and innovation. Certainly, we acknowledge a shift from a mechanistic approach to an evolutionary approach in economics, but believe there is yet one more shift that is required, one that involves injecting purpose-driven socio-technical co-design for the proliferation of PIT. It is in the acknowledgment that “societal development” should be the dominant aspect when considering the techno-economic paradigm, which in the first instance requires an evaluation of the manner in which we perceive production and consumption.