Critique of Instrumental Innovation. Notes on the Tension Between Method and Political Imagination

Abstract

The article examines the role that certain methodologies have come to occupy in public innovation processes and analyzes the effects that their stabilization produces on state action. Through a critical reading of the methodological turn in the field, it reconstructs how these approaches shape specific ways of intervening, defining problems, and orienting expectations about change. The analysis interprets these dynamics as technologies of capture that operate on procedures, imaginaries, and desire, situating innovation within pre-configured frames of meaning. From this perspective, innovation is approached as an instituting practice, situated and politically implicated, whose transformative potential lies in its capacity to reconfigure meaning and open new possibilities for public intervention.