The virtues of innovation are under attack. We must fight back.

Mark Dodgson

It has been a generally held assumption that innovation is a good thing. It stimulates competition, productivity, and efficiency and creates profits that reward initiative and risk-taking, generates jobs, increases tax returns, and produces social benefits by improved standards of living and quality of life.

There’s plenty of evidence that innovation underpins economic growth and development and, in countries such as China and India, raised millions out of poverty. Although innovation can destroy firms and jobs, it also creates new ones, and any downsides of innovation can be mitigated by competition policy, regulations, and intellectual property protection.

Recent events in the USA are questioning many of these assumptions, where the virtues of innovation are being sullied by extreme avarice and personal political ambition. For evidence you need look no further than the technology leaders in the front row of the Trump Presidential Inauguration. As brilliantly told in her excoriating book,[1] Kara Swisher captures the shifting motives of Silicon Valley’s ‘tech bros’.

While initially directed at broader purposes, such as connecting the world and reducing reliance on fossil fuels, Swisher describes how these aims have dramatically shifted. Shifts made stark by Elon Musk’s support for neo-Nazis in Germany. Innovation has led to monopoly power and profits with the clear purpose of purchasing political influence. That political power is rewarded by tax cuts for the very wealthy, deregulation, and the privatisation and emasculation of public institutions.

The simplistic view has emerged in the US that innovation in the private sector, epitomised by the tech bros, is the answer to everything, and all governments do is hold things back. SpaceX innovates faster and cheaper than NASA, so close down NASA; conveniently forgetting the purpose of NASA is discovery for the benefit of humanity, and SpaceX is fulfilling the ambition of an eccentric individual. NASA gave us the Hubble Telescope to explore and enlighten us about the universe; Jeff Bezos gives us Blue Origin’s joy ride for his wife and her mates.

It is also leading to the unfettered development of damaging technologies. Mark Zuckerberg’s aim to move fast and break things has been fantastically successful. A case can be made that the social media he was instrumental in developing has broken childhood and is having a crack at breaking democracy. New technologies can often be used for good or bad purposes. Drones can deliver much needed medical supplies to stricken communities, or bombs.

There are choices to be made, and grounds for being very concerned about the direction of travel. There is no escaping the fact that despite all its potential benefits, the impact of AI is unknown and potentially terrifying, and it is predicated essentially on industrial scale intellectual property theft. This is happening when government support gravitates towards the technology firms that back particular politicians, rather than the public as citizens and consumers.

In addition to lighting a bonfire of regulations and the easing of competition policies, the US government is intent on pursuing a vendetta not only on the institutions of science, but on science itself. Whether it be public health or reducing carbon-producing energy, dispassionate scientific inquiry is being sidelined by the whims and peculiarities of individual politicians, and the impact of an ideology at war with knowledge.[2]

The weaponisation of technology and innovation in global economic and political competition, which has always been with us, is being sharply accelerated and accentuated, but, in the light on the attacks on science and universities, seems more focussed on protecting existing positions, rather than on building future advantage.

While the US might at present be an outlier in its policy approach, all governments are having to come to terms with the new challenges of innovation and risk becoming infected by what is happening there, and most are hopelessly adrift.

In the UK, for example, the government is keen to promote its growth agenda by allowing free reign to AI companies, but is facing backlash from the nation’s important cultural industries appalled at what this implies for copyright protection and personal creativity. It is tangled between its belief that AI technology will produce the economic benefits needed to get the UK out of its investment and productivity slump, and the need to encourage the creative people who contribute so much to the richness – in all senses - of British society.

The UK government’s desire to hold social media firms to account for the damage they are demonstrably doing to British youth is now being compromised by the threat of Trump tariffs under the guise of curtailing the free speech of the technology firms that support him.

Recent events have shone an unflattering light not only on innovators such as Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, but on the leaders of other major corporations. For years we have been told of their concern for stakeholders as well as shareholders, and how deeply engrained were the values of environmental sustainability and social equity and inclusion. These values quickly crumbled in the face of political opprobrium, almost immediately in the US and we see signs of it happening elsewhere.

So craven has been the response of corporate leaders to the Trumpist agenda, that it is impossible to believe in the solidity of any of their values, including what were previously held to be the aims of innovation, and the need, for example, for diversity in the people creating it, and its use to alleviate climate change. One fears for the resolve of the leaders of pharmaceutical companies in the face of political opposition to vaccines, or for the strategies of energy companies to de-carbonise. We have seen how quickly BP, for example, has reversed its commitments to renewables.

The political pendulum may swing back, providing a different context for innovation, where the search for social equity and environmental sustainability are seen as positives rather than negatives. But what can be done in the meantime to ameliorate the downsides of the use of innovation and accentuate its virtues as a public good and stimulus to healthy competition? How do we fight back?

Better leaders who actually believe in and are prepared to defend the values they’ve been extolling would be a start. Boards of Directors and employees need to use louder voices when leaders opportunistically overturn long-held beliefs about the organisation for which they work in search of short-term gains and political favours. Greater concern on the part of individual shareholders and institutional investors for the non-financial consequences of their investments is always helpful. There is evidence, for example, that some UK financial institutions are withholding investments from US firms that retreat from long-held social values.

Most important is the role of individuals as innovators, consumers, and citizens. Those working on and diffusing innovations need to be much more mindful of the consequences of their work. Consumers should avoid purchasing goods from corporations led by people with malignant intent: it is marked how sales of Teslas have recently plummeted in Europe, and there are declining numbers of users of X.

As for government, a good place to start is to remember that innovation applied to health, education, defence, and climate is core to their purpose of improving citizen welfare. In the face of what is happening in the US, they need to double down on supporting the important role of the state in areas such as the support for scientific research, and of policies and regulations that encourage the benefits of innovation and mitigate against its downsides.

Governments must appreciate how the purchase of favours from malign actors – whether they offer computers, cars, or submarines – inevitably has negative consequences down the line.

Innovation is crucial to Australia’s future – although it is hard to discern this in the debates around the current election – and it would be disastrous to discard the virtues of the innovation agenda, that could do so much for Australians in the long term, in return for short-term political paybacks.

There are implications too for those, like me, who study innovation policy and management. Our focus has predominantly been on the questions of how governments and firms encourage innovation, and much has been learned. Recent events tell us we need to give much more attention to why they do so, with the hope that by throwing light on the malevolent use of innovation, greater attention will be paid to encouraging its virtues.

[1] Kara Swisher, Burn Book: A tech love story, Piatkus, 2024.

[2] Simon Schama, “Trump’s war on knowledge’, Financial Times, 26th April, 2025.

Professor Mark Dodgson is a global authority on innovation policy and management. His pioneering research has shaped international discourse on technological innovation, industry-university partnerships, and entrepreneurship. As a distinguished academic and author, his work bridges theoretical frameworks with practical applications, influencing both scholarly and policy domains worldwide.