This article explores how innovation logics infiltrate problem and value definitions in maintenance and repair, and how innovation itself depends on considerable, often invisible care work beyond the seemingly smooth entrepreneurial narratives. We build on a growing body of work in STS that investigates the relationship between innovation and maintenance and repair. This literature argues that the obsession with innovation crowds out attention to maintenance, that innovation creates future obligations of maintenance that are often not factored into technological promises, and that ordinary maintenance and repair practices are often innovative in their own right. Empirically, we explore a case where maintenance and repair become the explicit target of high-level, high-tech innovation initiatives and how, as a result, innovation logics colonize maintenance practices. Conceptually, we explore how repair and maintenance sensitivities can be applied to innovation practices to reveal the invisible work needed to align innovation instruments with socio-material and institutional configurations. Drawing on an in-depth case study of sewer inspection robots in Barcelona, we find that attempts to innovate maintenance require a symmetric effort to maintain innovation. In our case study, innovation processes as deployed by the European Commission, research consortia, and companies required substantial repair work to function reliably in specific settings. Our study shows how divergent understandings of the public good in innovation and maintenance contexts may lead to significant tensions, and that much can be gained analytically from not treating innovation and maintenance as opposites.

中文翻译：

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保持创新：如何使下水道机器人和创新政策在巴塞罗那发挥作用。


本文探讨了创新逻辑如何渗透到维护和维修中的问题和价值定义，以及创新本身如何依赖于看似顺利的创业叙述之外的大量、往往是无形的护理工作。我们以 STS 不断增长的工作为基础，研究创新与维护和维修之间的关系。该文献认为，对创新的痴迷挤出了对维护的关注，创新产生了未来的维护义务，而这些义务往往没有被纳入技术承诺中，而普通的维护和维修实践本身往往就是创新的。根据经验，我们探讨了这样一个案例：维护和维修成为高水平、高科技创新举措的明确目标，以及创新逻辑如何影响维护实践。从概念上讲，我们探讨了如何将维修和维护敏感性应用于创新实践，以揭示将创新工具与社会物质和制度配置相结合所需的隐形工作。通过对巴塞罗那下水道检查机器人的深入案例研究，我们发现创新维护的尝试需要对称的努力来维持创新。在我们的案例研究中，欧盟委员会、研究联盟和公司部署的创新流程需要大量的修复工作才能在特定环境下可靠运行。我们的研究表明，对创新和维护环境中公共利益的不同理解可能会导致严重的紧张关系，并且通过不将创新和维护视为对立的分析，可以获得很多东西。