Non-standard innovation: an attempt to (re)think innovation

In the face of ecological degradation, ethical concerns, and the growing instrumentalization of innovation by capitalist and managerial logics, this article proposes a radical rethinking of innovation. Drawing on Laruelle’s “non-philosophy,” later termed “non-standard philosophy,” it advances a shift from conventional techno-economic approaches toward what I define as non-standard innovation. Moving beyond Schumpeterian creative destruction, this perspective challenges not only dominant models of innovation but also the ontological foundations that render innovation an unquestioned horizon of progress. Rather than assuming innovation to be inherently beneficial or self-legitimating, the article treats innovation as material to be suspended, interrogated, and reconfigured through philosophical intervention. Building on, yet critically extending, existing alternative paradigms, such as commons-based peer production, user innovation, post-growth innovation, and cosmolocal frameworks, this approach does not merely pluralize innovation models but questions the conditions under which innovation itself becomes authoritative. By mobilizing non-standard philosophy not simply to critique innovation, but to suspend its claim to sufficiency and to articulate new rules for engaging with it, the article develops three foundational objectives for non-standard innovation: (1) an orientation toward individuals and the common good rather than organizational survival alone; (2) a transcendental–immanent method that remains grounded in the real while interrogating the conditions of innovation’s legitimacy; and (3) a quasi-scientific, explicitly transdisciplinary framework capable of remaining contestable, practical, and ethically accountable. Non-standard innovation thus emerges not as a negation of innovation, but as a constructive act of resistance and re-creation. It offers a new conceptual vocabulary and methodological posture for reorienting innovation toward responsible, convivial, and genuinely transformative practices.