Technology for inclusive development: The role of cooperativism and innovation for social inclusion

LUCAS BECERRA; HERNÁN THOMAS

CABA

Jornada; CfP ESJP Meeting; 2014

The Network Engineering Social Justice and Peace

This chapter aims at providing a critical analysis of a set of established ideas around the type and the nature of the productive units which should be privileged as organizers of an innovation and production system. In stylized terms, economic theory on technological change has posited: (i) that innovation is a result of a dynamic competition between profit-maximizing companies; (ii) that said competition, which sparks new merchandises and new production techniques, necessarily leads to higher economic growth rates, and (iii) that, as profit-maximizing companies are by definition the loci of innovation, they should be treated as the key actor of public policies for innovation. Based on a critical assessment of those statements, this paper resorts to theoretical developments to position worker cooperatives as actors providing dynamism to innovation and social development processes. Particularly, the goal is to highlight the role of these productive units in the context of Science, Technology, and Innovation (STI) public policy. Thus, the working hypothesis is that a shift in focus towards worker cooperatives could have the potential to set in motion a series of dynamics of learning, knowledge sharing, and techno-productive capability generation which would entail more democratic processes of knowledge acquisition and generation of the associated value.