Innovation, in common usage, has become nearly synonymous with technological progress. When we speak of innovative companies, we typically refer to those at the frontier of digital technology, artificial intelligence, or biotechnology. When governments develop innovation strategies, they focus on research and development pipelines, patent portfolios, and the transfer of knowledge and products to market. The term, in its prevailing sense, describes what happens in laboratories and startups, and its measure is economic return.
This conception is remarkably narrow. Throughout history, the most consequential innovations have often been social, institutional, and cultural. The emergence of democratic governance, the development of systems of universal education, the recognition of the equality of women and men—these were innovations of the first order, requiring new patterns of thought, new forms of social organization, and sustained effort across generations. They transformed the conditions of human life more profoundly than most technological breakthroughs. Yet we rarely call them innovations.
The reduction of innovation to its technological and economic dimensions gained momentum in the latter half of the twentieth century. The convergence of advances in physics, electronics, and computer science gave rise to the information revolution, which became the engine of a new era of economic growth. National innovation systems emerged, linking government, academia, and industry in pursuit of competitiveness and market advantage.1See, for example, Anahita Baregheh, Jennifer Rowley, and Sally Sambrook, “Towards a Multidisciplinary Definition of Innovation,” Management Decision 47, no. 8 (2009): 1323–39. In this context, the word “innovation” came to denote primarily the development and commercialization of new technologies, and an economic perspective focused on productivity, efficiency, and profitability became the dominant lens through which innovation was understood.2Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Row, 1950).
The consequences of this narrowing have been significant. An innovation paradigm driven by competition and profitability has generated remarkable material advances, but it has also deepened inequalities, concentrated wealth, and created patterns of disruption that communities struggle to absorb. The relentless pace of technological change is reshaping social interaction in ways whose implications we have barely begun to understand, particularly in artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, and digital platforms.
A growing body of thought recognizes that the value of innovation lies not only in the technology itself but also in its social adoption and its effects on human well-being.3See Matt Weinberg, “Technology, Values, and the Shaping of Social Reality,” The Bahá’í World, 23 May 2019, bahaiworld.bahai.org/library/technology-values-and-the-shaping-of-social-reality-2/; E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (Harper Perennial, 1973); W. Brian Arthur, The Nature of Technology (Free Press, 2009). The field of social innovation has emerged in response, centering on community development, local entrepreneurship, and models of enterprise oriented toward social benefit rather than profit alone.4Liliya Satalkina and Gerald Steiner, “Social Innovation: A Retrospective Perspective,” Minerva 60, no. 4 (2022): 567–91. This is a meaningful step. Yet even social innovation, as it is commonly conceived, tends to treat the spiritual dimensions of human life as peripheral rather than central. Questions of purpose, moral development, and the cultivation of human capacities are left largely unexplored.
What would it mean to conceive of innovation more expansively? To recognize that the development of new patterns of community life, the creation of institutions founded on principles of justice and unity, or the cultivation of habits of collaborative inquiry are themselves innovative processes as genuinely creative and consequential as any technological advance?
Such a reconceptualization does not diminish the importance of scientific and technological progress. It situates that progress within a broader understanding of human development that encompasses the material, the social, and the spiritual. Innovation, viewed in this light, is a fundamentally human capacity for generating new forms of collective life, new ways of organizing relationships, and new expressions of our material, intellectual, and moral potential. It follows then that innovation is not merely a mechanism for producing goods and services. The printing press, the machinery of the industrial revolution, the Internet—each of these was significant both as a technological invention and because of the profound social transformations it set in motion.5Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 2001). An understanding of innovation that attends only to the device and not to the transformation it produces is, at best, incomplete.
The question, then, is not simply whether innovation should be guided by ethical principles, though clearly, as this essay argues, it should—it is whether innovation, properly understood, has a spiritual dimension that must be acknowledged if its fruits are to serve the common good. Innovation emerges from the collaboration and creativity of individuals, communities, and institutions. Its quality depends on the qualities of those who participate in it: their willingness to learn, their capacity for cooperation, their commitment to equity, their concern for the well-being of others. These are constitutive of the innovation process, not merely desirable addenda to it. An innovation culture shaped by humility, solidarity, and a genuine concern for the weakest members of society will produce fundamentally different outcomes than one driven by competition and the desire for dominance.
This insight finds powerful expression in the Bahá’í writings. ‘Abdu’l-Bahá describes two calls that summon humanity to progress. The first is “the call of civilization, of the progress of the material world,” encompassing the laws, sciences, and systems through which humanity develops. The second is “the soul-stirring call of God,” whose spiritual teachings safeguard “the eternal happiness and illumination of the world of humanity.” Neither call, He insists, is sufficient on its own: “Until material achievements, physical accomplishments and human virtues are reinforced by spiritual perfections, luminous qualities and characteristics of mercy, no fruit or result shall issue therefrom.” Material civilization, however impressive, remains conjoined with barbarism unless it is “confirmed by Divine Guidance” and “reinforced by spiritual conduct.”6‘Abdu’l-Bahá, Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, no. 225, bahai.org/r/247504693.
This is not merely a moral caution about the dangers of technology but a claim about the nature of progress itself. Innovation that attends only to material and economic dimensions, however sophisticated, will remain incomplete and ultimately self-defeating. A civilization’s capacity for genuine advancement depends on the degree to which its material achievements are animated by spiritual insight.
What does innovation look like when it proceeds from this integrated understanding? The experience of Bahá’í communities worldwide offers one set of illustrations. In diverse settings across the globe, communities are developing new patterns of collective decision-making that draw on the capacities of all their members; new educational processes that cultivate intellectual, moral, and spiritual capacities in tandem; and new approaches to social and economic life rooted in principles of reciprocity and service.7Bahá’í International Community, For the Betterment of the World. These efforts do not proceed from a fixed blueprint but through an ongoing process of study, action, and reflection, a mode of learning that is itself an innovation in how communities generate and apply knowledge.8Farzam Arbab, “Promoting a Discourse on Science, Religion, and Development,” in The Lab, the Temple and the Market, ed. Sharon Harper (IDRC, 2000), 149–237. They are tested in settings that reflect the full diversity of the human family, and they are yielding insights about human capacity and social organization that deserve sustained attention.
The accelerating pace of technological change makes an expanded understanding of innovation not merely desirable, but urgent. Without it, societies will continue to adopt powerful technologies within frameworks that cannot ensure their benefits are widely shared or their risks adequately addressed. Governance and regulation are necessary, but not sufficient. What is needed, in addition, are people—individuals, communities, and institutions—whose moral and spiritual capacities equip them to direct the creative energies of this age toward the building of a civilization that contributes to the welfare of all. As ‘Abdu’l-Bahá wrote, “The honor and distinction of the individual consist in this, that he among all the world’s multitudes should become a source of social good.” Innovation, at its best, is an expression of precisely this aspiration.9 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, The Secret of Divine Civilization, bahai.org/r/006593911.