The scientific-technological revolution in the past twenty years has operated deep and fast changes in production ways and in the social relations that follow. Sociology's primary object, i.e., social change, becomes increasingly complex and challenges the discipline's theoretical and methodological potential. Those current processes of change can be summarized in the expression "knowledge society". Innovation (in its broader sense, technological and social) becomes a key object both for social science and for the development of policies and strategies. While sociology can build concepts with a high explanatory power for the specificity of cultural and political-institutional environments though the study of innovation processes, it has been demonstrated that most of the research on innovation and development so far carried out in Brazil does not fulfill the needs of understanding and analyzing innovation processes. This article presents a set of three closely related factors that seem to be restraining the capability to analyze and explain those processes, followed by strategic counterarguments aimed at contributing and strengthening the studies in the innovation field.
Interdisciplinarity; social theory; sociology of innovation; helices