Editorial

Social sciences in the development of technological innovation processes

Juan Diego Betancur Arias

Universidad Católica Luis Amigó

How to cite this article in APA:

Betancur Arias, J. D. (2022). Social sciences in the development of technological innovation processes [Editorial]. Revista Colombiana de Ciencias Sociales, 13(1), 17-20. https://doi.org/10.21501/22161201.4227

At present, the social sciences continue to maintain restraint to incorporate themselves creatively into sustainable actions that allow the development of technical, technological, and innovative development activities. This issue has meant that the gap between knowledge, social science, and innovation development is not sufficiently articulated to provide dosed changes to the social economy, cultural innovation, and technological development and its related systems.

This reckless reservation in the social sciences has disregarded the new logic pursued by modern thought concerning innovation, research for artistic and cultural creation, research development in the strict sense, and the modification of programmatic and inflexible practices typical of science processes in this corpus of knowledge. According to Estévez et al. (2018), the last five years have been characterized by processes of adaptability and transformation in the ways and forms of doing social science, which turn our gaze towards the importance of innovation as an internal engine of the economy, as one of the great precursors of social and cultural transformations through science processes could conceive from the beginning, the Austrian economist Schumpeter (1942).

Technology is still conceiving itself as the most exclusive piece of the processes of scientific development, artistic and cultural creation, and innovations. Being an extremely powerful figure in scientific structures, imaginaries and stylistic profiles emerge that try to understand, explain and disseminate the constructions about the axioms that make up the strict concept of technology.

Although technology is what allows the creation of mechanisms and artifacts at the service of productive, economic, and social systems, it is through research + creation (R & C) that these tangible products can be generated and susceptible to commodification in the scenarios where science, technology, and innovation are consumed, that is, in everything we do daily.

Thinking of technology as the result of abstract, tangible, and engineering processes at the scientific level, shows the aesthetic notions, not of forms that researchers in the social sciences and humanities possess, to rethink themselves as social and scientific actors, capable of producing social and cultural technology at the service of society. This genesis is understood in the research processes that researchers dedicated to specific knowledge know how to follow, but obsolete for the immediate, fluctuating, and dynamic response that merits the productive context of science, which today extends through the unsnomable artistic and cultural frontiers.

Social scientists have been at the service of contexts where many qualitative and quantitative data have already been obtained and of which we have also participated very hastily to measure and impact phenomena with methods tested and piloted in the laboratory, but it is time to inquire about the conditions, competences, skills, and talents of contemporary researchers; those who continue to respond to the cienciométrica (measurement of science) model by scrutinizing an important place for social innovation, creativity and the connection between forms, methods, experiences and productive scenarios at the service of being.

A paradigm shift has been needed within the research programs in social sciences where the purposes are focused on technical, technological, and social innovation, the product of the applied advances that manage to be developed through research processes. It is not exclusive to research in natural sciences to carry out processes at this level, also applied and basic research in social sciences and humanities can and requires enabling with great force, the development of technology and innovation products.

The emergence of the triple helix innovation model in the mid-2000s in the science, technology, and innovation system of Colombia, has been producing conjunctural phenomena among researchers and research groups that affect the scientific evolution of the social sciences, their paradigmatic models, instrumental rationality, and methodological approaches for the construction of scientific results that are aimed at the establishment of products that are tied. They revere the nature of development, artistic, cultural creation, and innovation. The need to make changes in the objects of study and welcome new emerging models that challenge the commercialization of scientific results resulting from research activity are some of the intrinsic that have been presented among research centers and researchers, which, for our particular case as a country, the vast majority of them are in universities.

Flexibility, openness, and de-learning to the concept of traditional scientific production in the social sciences

The positioning of the new epistemologies of the south, the comprehensive, phenomenological looks, socio-historical research, cultural hermeneutics, among other forms, methods, or models to do science, already showed us that it was necessary to decentralize the hegemonic discourse of positivism and post-positivism at the service of scientific structures. Although our interest is focused on the explanatory paradigm, we do not fail to recognize that it has generated great biases that point to the bifurcated social perspectives that have been developed between qualitative and quantitative, to the point of thinking, disseminating, and commenting in academic scenarios the methodological weakness of interpretive cohort research.

It is not fair, scientifically, that one paradigm or another is the most governing or the one that in its absence generates more or less scientific (scientific) production. They are the notions that bring us closer to concepts of science open to all, without hierarchies between social levels to access scientific products, without demands given by cognitive capitalism to transform everyday scenarios into new ways of appreciating the real, with the license to sustain itself over time. Thus, scientific production in the social sciences goes beyond generating new knowledge, contributing to the robust structures of scientific committees and elites.

At present it is going through a production that re-creates, re-configures, re-generates all the cienciométrica (measurement of science) cold scincial activity by a conglomerate of attributes, attitudes, and dispositions on the part of the centers of thought and researchers; towards innovation, artistic and cultural creation, the renewal of the bonus for R&C projects and the scientific anchoring to new social and cultural structures to direct solutions based on systematic methods with ecological validity.

It is clear that at least in our country the figure of independent researcher does not exist, nor is it well-conceived for us who work as scientists at the service of think tanks or universities. We have adhered to the models of public, political, and social science, whose elements in each one governs our praxis. All production must be aligned with the criteria of public science, however, there are some bumps or difficulties that hinder the balance in the development of product typologies endorsed by the Ministry of Science of Colombia.

Researchers assigned to the social sciences and humanities groups fail to specify diversified models and methods that allow other researchers in the same areas to take as a reference to undertaking practices related to innovation and artistic and cultural creation. Although there is the Frascati Manual, the guidelines of the Oslo Manual, among others, there is still a greater inclination for new knowledge products, without using these for other developments that derive from this same base. Optimizing scientific production is a fundamental issue to decentralize practices adhering to the traditional model of doing science.

Conflict Of Interest

The authors declare the absence of a conflict of interest with an institution or commercial association of any kind.

References

Estévez, H. A. B., Cabanzo, F., Delgado, T. C., Salgar, Ó. H., Soto, A. S. N., & Salamanca, J. (2018). Apuntes sobre el debate académico en Colombia en el proceso de reconocimiento gubernamental de la creación como práctica de generación de nuevo conocimiento, desa­rrollo tecnológico e innovación. Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales y Artes Escénicas, 13(1), 281-294. https://doi.org/10.11144/javeriana.mavae13-1.asda

Notas de autor

Juan Diego Betancur Arias

Doctor en Psicología con Orientación en Neurociencia Cognitiva Aplicada, integrante del grupo de investigación: Neurociencias Básicas y Aplicadas, Línea: Neurociencia Aplicada a las Organizaciones, Facultad de Psicología y Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Católica Luis Amigó, Medellín-Colombia. Contacto: cienciayacademia@amigo.edu.co