Seeking the face of innovation with the ethical compass of Emmanuel Levinas.
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2008Author
Costello, Gabriel
Donnellan, Brian
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Costello, G. and Donnellan, B. (2008) Seeking the face of innovation with the ethical compass of Emmanuel Levinas. In IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 287, Open IT-Based Innovation: Moving Towards Cooperative IT Transfer and Knowledge Diffusion, eds. (León, G. and Bernardos, A. and Casar, J. and Kautz, K. and Degross, J., Eds), pp 97-117 Springer, Boston.
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Abstract
A recent biographer has described the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas as being permeated
by one simple but profound theme: western philosophy has at best ignored and at worst
suppressed the ¿Other¿. The approach of this study involved a concept-centric examination of
innovation terminology assembled from key papers in the area. The analysis presents evidence
of the lack of regard in the literature for the human dimension, with the notable exception of
the work of Andrew Van de Ven and his collaborators. Consequently, an ethical definition of
innovation is proposed inspired by the theoretical lens of Levinas. We argue that the work
makes a practical and philosophical contribution to the emerging debate on ethics by the IS
community. Furthermore, we suggest that our analysis has implications for DOI research
increasingly being carried out in an open-innovation paradigm.