In the still-smouldering aftermath of the global economic meltdown of 2008, Former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz (2009) predicted that capitalist economic systems would now need to enact profound change. As of 2019, the political answer still appeared to be that, as Margaret Thatcher so staunchly insisted back in the 1980s, There is No Alternative. Capitalist systems had largely returned to business as usual. Around the world, the rich got richer while inequalities grew, wages stagnated, and a war on public services was waged under the flags of ‘austerity’ and paying down national debts. Yet post-industrial countries continued to experience relatively low levels of growth in comparison to the pre-crisis years, at least as measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Policy makers made status-quo choices in the belief that to do otherwise was to risk a return to the disastrous stagflation of the 1970s. Thus, accelerating innovation – in the sense of getting more new things to the market faster – increasingly became championed as not just a good way, but The Only Way to stimulate economic growth. And then, early in 2020, a novel coronavirus appeared, demanding a policy response that at first appeared unthinkable: to shut down as much of the global economy as possible in order to slow the progress of the virus as it spread around the world.

Where the global economy is right now is not where it was when we wrote this book, and it is far too early to tell where it will go. It is entirely possible that once the health crisis recedes, the same rhetoric will re-emerge – that only (marketbased) innovation will allow us to navigate the economic crisis which will inevitably follow. We do not argue that for-market innovation will have no role to play in how our economies recover, nor can we try to predict how the shutdown is likely to affect our innovation systems. With the number of countries issuing stay-home orders still rising as we go to press, that would be both premature and beyond what we originally set out to do. Instead, we hope to broaden the conceptual landscape within which decisions will be made by not losing sight of where we were when this latest crisis began, what assumptions have been made about the relationship between innovation and growth, and what options (and constraints) were already in the system – and still are.