Innovation as Adoption of a New Norm

Distinguishing Invention from Innovation

When we talk about innovation, we often think about technology, startups, spectacular inventions. Yet sociology invites us to shift our perspective: innovation is not the invention itself, but the process by which a novelty becomes an ordinary practice, a new social norm.

Norbert Alter, in L’innovation ordinaire (Ordinary Innovation, 2000), establishes an essential distinction. He defines innovation as “the collective ability to give meaning and efficiency to a novelty.” Invention, on the other hand, “represents only the ability to create a novelty.” An invention can remain without effect if nobody appropriates it. Innovation is always a story—the story of a process that transforms a discovery into new social practices.

This distinction was already present in Gabriel Tarde’s work as early as 1890 in The Laws of Imitation. For Tarde, social evolution is not determined by external laws but by individual initiatives—inventions—which spread through imitation. The pair invention-imitation constitutes the fundamental engine of social change.

Innovation as Transgression, Then Normalization

Alter develops a strong thesis: to innovate is first to transgress. Innovating always represents taking a risk, a form of daily deviance. Innovators are often atypical, dissident, or critical individuals, before being caught up by the norms they challenge.

The innovation process unfolds in three stages according to Alter:

The initial idea: a novelty appears, carried by a few marginal individuals.

Appropriation: social actors seize this novelty, adapt it, transform it. This phase determines whether the invention will become an innovation.

Institutionalization: the new practice progressively becomes a norm. What was deviant becomes commonplace and integrates into formal and informal rules.

Remote work illustrates this dynamic. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, those who practiced it were perceived as marginal, suspected of not really working—a deviance from the norm of presenteeism. Today, remote work has become institutionalized: what was deviant has become the norm.

Ordinary Deviance as an Engine of Change

What Alter calls “ordinary deviance” is not a social pathology. Deviance is at the heart of movement; it comes from actors who transgress rules and challenge the validity of the principles underlying them. But it constitutes a means of socialization and is located at the borders of the norm rather than outside it.

This perspective connects with Howard Becker’s work in Outsiders (1963). Becker shows that deviance is not outside the world of norms but just at its borders. Ordinary deviance is an active contribution to the development of new forms—but this contribution can only be achieved outside established forms, because the latter do not allow their own transformation.

Innovation Is Not the Business of Elites

Another major contribution of this sociology: innovation is not driven from the top. Elites cannot decree innovation since it always represents unexpected use, the perversion or appropriation of a decision. But elites know how to benefit from everyday innovators by transforming their innovative practices into laws, by institutionalizing them.

The critical activity of innovators is not exercised as a function but because, by appropriating and diverting the invention, they seize the opportunity to realize projects different from those of the institution. It is a banal activity, not done by decision-makers.

Implications: Ordinary Innovation

The sociology of innovation analyzes the processes that lead a new practice to become habitual behavior. It represents an analysis of the passage between before and after.

Innovation is less a rupture than a gradual transformation of norms: what was deviant yesterday becomes the rule tomorrow. And this process, far from being exceptional, is profoundly ordinary—hence the title of Alter’s reference work.