The latest issue of Prometheus – Critical Studies in Innovation (Volume 40, Issue 2&3) begins with another entertaining editorial from Stuart Macdonald exploring why companies are buying up journals and how they make money from “zombie” journals “Journal for sale? What offers?”.

In “Higher education research on the dark side of digitalisation: the subtle reproduction of technological solutionism” Gerrit Kiewiet and Jelle Mampaey consider how COVID-19 forced higher education institutions into an overnight shift to remote teaching and how Big Tech companies have been empowered to track student behaviour through surveillance practices, invasive profiling, and unauthorised surveillance, positioning users as consumers of technology rather than as academic learners.  Scientific breakthroughs tend not to begin life as polished theories.

Tan Aik Kah sees “Preprints as anticipatory infrastructures: preserving the generative phase of trans-disciplinary innovation” expanding society’s capacity to imagine, contest, and co-create knowledge futures. In “Playing catch-up: Can the use of innovative externally orientated management accounting techniques create and sustain competitive advantage?” Babajide Oyewo, Kolawole Adeyemi Alo, Adeyemo Kingsley Aderemi, Palto Datta and Oluwamayowa Olalekan Iredele are interested in how innovative approaches to accountancy can shed new light on what they measure in the manufacturing industry in Nigeria. In “Exploration of the origins and development of disruptive innovation theory” Jianming Zhou, Qi Feng, Minghan Su and Bin Xie look at publications in the field to work out what is going on and to classify the results. English language papers are compared with those in Chinese. Loitongbam Athouba Meetei and Dilip S. Mutum explore “The paradox of global excellence and local relevance: universities’ third mission in developing economies”. The paper highlights the crucial role of intermediaries and academic volunteers in technology transfer from universities. It also identifies specific barriers experienced with technology transfer to rural areas, such as cultural resistance, lack of sustained support, and institutional constraints.  In “Latent optics: the capture of peripheral surveillance through Public Space CCTV” Janos Mark Szakolczai considers that the camera captures not only intended information, but also information from the periphery that can be combined with data from other cameras for analysis and discovery of what was not even sought. Finally, Victor P. Seidel looks at what the classics have to say about innovation in “Comparing logics of organizing across Plato, Aristotle and Machiavelli: tensions and implications for innovation management and responsible innovation”.