The Dancing Cop: Semiotics and Innovation

As a consequence of the global financial crisis, innovation is being increasingly indicated as the key solution to the lack of economic growth that affects present-day societies worldwide, especially in the Old Continent. The paper will adopt a semiotic approach so as to tackle the issue of innovation from two contrasting points of view: Level 1: how can semiotics conceive, characterize, describe, and facilitate innovation? Through what theoretical, methodological, analytical, and experimental frameworks? Is semiotics the answer to the problem of injecting creativity into socio-economic processes? Level 2: how can semiotics contextualize, analyze, explain, and demystify the current global thirst for innovation? Will innovation really save the world? Or is it just a new myth that semiotics, on the wake of Barthes, should reframe as the desperate utopia of an ageing civilization?