From Entrepreneurialism to Innovation: Research, Critique, and the Innovation Union

In the process of integration, Europe has been reframed as a different space. The Lisbon Strategy, which aimed to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge economy in the world, has recently been superseded by strategies for the creation of an Innovation Union. The recasting of the European Union as an Innovation Union recasts the role of the university and of the researcher. The shift not only affects institutions usually associated with knowledge production however; innovation is now a priority across all policy areas and for all actors to be able to adapt to and survive in current conditions. The creation of an Innovation Union brings about shifts of emphasis from a general entrepreneurialism to a more focused innovation and from learning to research. Current regimes of performance have been argued to effect an immunisation and thus a stifling, or domestication, of critique. The Innovation Union is constituted as a space by devices for measuring innovation and by actors acting in the name of such performance measures. The innovative researcher required of this space is a mobile, adaptable individual seeking permanently to rethink how she does what she does in the name of efficiency, sustainability and responsibility, for which she requires permanent feedback. The possibility of resisting this mode of governance requires a reorientation of the researcher’s attitude to the present. This is explored with reference to the reconceptualisation of the university by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons and the attitude of exposition found in the work of Michel Foucault and Bruno Latour.