Maintaining innovation: How to make sewer robots and innovation policy work in Barcelona

This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investig...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social studies of science 2024-06, Vol.54 (3), p.352-376
Main Authors: Cuevas-Garcia, Carlos, Pepponi, Federica, Pfotenhauer, Sebastian M.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Case studies
Crowds
Diffusion of Innovation
Innovations
Inventions
Organizational Innovation
Repair
Repair & maintenance
Robotics
Robots
Sewage
Sewer maintenance
Spain
Work
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Summary:This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the obsession with innovation crowds out attention to maintenance, that innovation creates future obligations of maintenance that are often not factored into technological promises, and that ordinary maintenance and repair practices are often innovative in their own right. Empirically, we explore a case where maintenance and repair become the explicit target of high-level, high-tech innovation initiatives and how, as a result, innovation logics colonize maintenance practices. Conceptually, we explore how repair and maintenance sensitivities can be applied to innovation practices to reveal the invisible work needed to align innovation instruments with socio-material and institutional configurations. Drawing on an in-depth case study of sewer inspection robots in Barcelona, we find that attempts to innovate maintenance require a symmetric effort to maintain innovation. In our case study, innovation processes as deployed by the European Commission, research consortia, and companies required substantial repair work to function reliably in specific settings. Our study shows how divergent understandings of the public good in innovation and maintenance contexts may lead to significant tensions, and that much can be gained analytically from not treating innovation and maintenance as opposites.
ISSN:0306-3127
1460-3659
DOI:10.1177/03063127231207082