Innovation Ethics: Reframing the Investor Thesis

While entrepreneurship characterizes an ideal form of self-sufficiency, in practice entrepreneurs find themselves subject to a complex network of support systems, which in effect exploit their talents, resources, and passion for structural risk mitigation. This dynamic infrastructure composed of founders, investors, and service providers is not a necessary institution, but rather the result of intersectional incentive structures managed by the professionalization of a process which is supposed to be anti-professional. This paradox should be addressed at a structural level if we hope to preserve the ideal of entrepreneurship. Innovation Ethics proposes a solution where we reframe a regulatory metric away from optimization towards innovation through the redistribution of risk across the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This solution finds support in a model of innovation ethics which we have designed to correct the over-reliance on naturalistic models, by stimulating a debate over how, and even if, innovation should proceed.