Insatiable Curiosity Innovation in a Fragile Future [Paperback]

Helga Nowotny is not only la grande dame of science studies in Europe, she is also one of the most savvy and influential people in European research affairs.... It seems regrettable that this essay from a leading European science-policy figure has not been published in English.

Societies today promote innovation and curiosity as tracks to the futurebut if the quest for the new is unrestrained, what is to keep societies from careening off the rails? This is the dilemma explored in this brief but provocative meditation by Helga Nowotny, one of Europe's most distinguished and influential scholars. Imagine a tool that is at once a precise probe and a far-reaching map: it is this book.

An influential scholar in science studies argues that innovation tames the insatiable and limitless curiosity driving science, and that society's acute ambivalence about this is an inevitable legacy of modernity.

Curiosity is the main driving force behind scientific activity. Scientific curiosity, insatiable in its explorations, does not know what it will find, or where it will lead. Science needs autonomy to cultivate this kind of untrammeled curiosity; innovation, however, responds to the needs and desires of society. Innovation, argues influential European science studies scholar Helga Nowotny, tames the passion of science, harnessing it to produce "deliverables." Science brings uncertainties; innovation successfully copes with them. Society calls for both the passion for knowledge and its taming. This ambivalence, Nowotny contends, is an inevitable result of modernity. In Insatiable Curiosity, Nowotny explores the strands of the often unexpected intertwining of science and technology and society. Uncertainty arises, she writes, from an oversupply of knowledge. The quest for innovation is society's response to the uncertainties that come with scientific and technological achievement. Our dilemmal“%