When we first began discussing the concept of ‘responsible stagnation’ (RS), the possibility of this referring to a voluntary near-total shutdown of economic activity never entered into anyone's mind. Yet as we go to press, whole countries, as well as individual towns, cities, states and provinces across the world are doing just that in the hope of controlling the spread of a novel coronavirus, COVID-19.

We are aware that the world in which we wrote this book may differ in many aspects from the one in which it will be read. Yet when we ourselves stagnated production in order to reconsider the text, we found that very little of what we had written needed to be changed. This is not because we foresaw a crisis coming, but because the systems and assumptions we discuss are still informing policy decisions, even as the most responsible choice – preserving life over preserving the economic status quo – is thankfully being made. What will happen as we exit the present crisis is impossible to predict from where we currently sit, with close to four billion people under some kind of confinement. We do not know what the innovation landscape will look like when we finally exit from our locked-down state, or the kind of work ‘innovation’ will be asked to do. The only thing we can state with certainty is that the COVID-19 pandemic has already catalysed an astounding wave of invention and innovation – in its broadest sense – and will continue to do so for some time.

The book you hold is an outgrowth of discussions which took place between the founding members of the Fourth Quadrant Research Network on Responsible Stagnation (4QRN) between 2017 and 2019. Of that larger group, seven of us (de Saille, Medvecky, van Oudheusden, Albertson, Amanatidou, Birabi and Pansera) undertook the actual writing down of some of the ideas developed through a series of virtual seminars and honed during face-to-face workshops and conference panels. Although each chapter is credited to a particular author (and in some instances, their collaborators from other projects), all seven of us have contributed throughout.