We started this book reflecting on Joseph Stiglitz's unfulfilled prediction of 2009 – that following the global economic crisis, the current dominant economic system would need to enact profound change. So far, this has not been the case. There is nothing new in pointing this out, nor that devotion to freemarket, laissez-faire capitalism is inseparable from our inability to address increasingly disruptive health, environmental and social concerns. However, there is at last a rumble from across the globe (even from institutions such as the World Economic Forum!) that suggests a growing agreement that our present socio-economic systems are ‘no longer fit for purpose’ (Schwab, 2017). Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the harm that has been done to public health and social support systems over the last ten years in search of GDP growth. It may be argued that this has exacerbated the pandemic's impact, leaving even the richest countries desperately short of equipment and medical personnel, and forcing governments to implement vast welfare programmes to support the millions of workers finding themselves suddenly unemployed, policies which would have been unthinkable just weeks before.

But pointing out the shortcomings of the present system is only half the battle. The other half is to offer viable alternatives, to imagine a better economic and social system and to find steps to reach it from where we are, based on innovation in the broadest sense of that word. We understand that what we have discussed here so far may not represent the kind of truly radical change that many people – including many of us – would like to see. But it is also possible that what appears now to be a rather small change in the way we think about innovation is, in fact, the beginning of a much bigger re-imaging of ‘the system’ than we could realize any other way.

Of course, we don't just want to innovate; we want to innovate responsibly. Echoing David Guston (2015), who could be against that? Innovating responsibly obviously requires we take both ‘responsibility’ and ‘innovation’ seriously, as we should. But, as we have argued, it also requires a careful look at responsibility and stagnation as well, and how these terms can change in specific contexts.