Disruptive innovation requires humanities’ input

The paper outlines a series of examples of radical innovation taking place within arts- and humanities-driven projects.

Innovation is becoming ever more central to policy makers’ priorities for supporting research policies, which are expected to guarantee societal and economic impact. This requires radically new answers to new challenges, such as climate change, access to clean water, health and food security, emerging alongside social and cultural progress. This paper focuses on innovation processes that have the ‘human factor’ at their very core. The human factor is akin to actions that change peoples’ lives and behaviour–which arts and humanities research help to identify.

In their publication, the Scientific Committee’s members stress that radical innovation should therefore be integrated from the outset into any strategies for tackling societal challenges. This requires creating conditions for researchers to work across disciplinary boundaries. Indeed, interdisciplinary work facilitates creativity and radical thinking designed to tackle complex societal challenges which are more and more interdisciplinary in nature.

The paper states that Europe should abandon the prevailing approach to innovation that has informed European policies and funding programmes so far, in particular Horizon 2020. The authors find that the current approach has relegated the human factor–and hence arts and humanities research–to the peripheries of the scientific landscape.