Innovation residues are the material and immaterial left-behinds of innovations that persist long after moments of production and consumption. Far from being passive remnants, they continue to shape human lives and societies, standing as witnesses to cultures of innovation, political choices, and the frequent prioritisation of short-term impacts over long-term sustainability. At a time when technological innovation is framed as a central driver of societal futures, it becomes crucial to scrutinise not only how innovations are imagined and implemented, but also how societies engage with the residues they leave behind.
INNORES offers a novel perspective by shifting the analytical focus from innovations themselves to their residues. It investigates how democratic societies conceptualise, make sense of, live with, and care for residues, and how these practices reshape their broader relation to innovation. This approach opens up vital questions of intergenerational justice, responsibility, and the distribution of risks and benefits, while also highlighting the infrastructures of care necessary to ensure sustainable futures.
The project concentrates on three key domains of innovation—nuclear energy, plastics, and digital technologies—each producing diverse kinds of residues with very different temporalities, materialities, and societal implications. Through a comparative, qualitative mixed-method design across Austria, Ireland, France, and the EU level, INNORES traces how local practices are entangled with global challenges and policy debates.
By developing a residue-centred theoretical framework, analysing the diverse ways residues are interpreted, governed and taken care of, and exploring how temporal dimensions of residues shape decision-making, INNORES advances an empirically grounded understanding of responsibility and care in innovation societies. In doing so, it not only enriches academic perspectives and societal reflections but can also contribute to policy debates, emphasising the need for governance approaches that acknowledge the enduring legacies of innovation.
