Technē, phronēsis, and poiesis: a narrative-humanistic framework for teaching innovation in the age of artificial intelligence

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly automates technical execution, the labour-market value of narrowly defined technical skills is widely argued to be shifting toward human capacities that remain difficult to replicate, including perspective-taking, critical judgment, ethical discernment, and meaning-making. This conceptual analysis, informed by the author's reflective teaching practice, challenges the marginal positioning of literary study within innovation education and argues that literary thinking can contribute a substantive foundation for human-centred innovation. Its primary purpose is theory-building: it develops and specifies a pedagogical framework rather than reporting an empirical evaluation. It is guided by the question: how can literary and philosophical practices be integrated into innovation education as a structured pedagogical sequence that complements design thinking and responds to the risks of uncritical reliance on generative AI? Drawing on the contested experimental and meta-analytic literature on fiction reading and social cognition, on Aristotle's and Heidegger's accounts of technē (craft), poiesis (making or bringing-forth), and phronēsis (practical wisdom), and on research on design thinking, design fiction, responsible innovation, and AI literacy, the article develops the Narrative-Humanistic Innovation Pedagogy (NHIP). NHIP integrates four interrelated pillars: Empathic Immersion, Critical Interrogation, Ethical Grey-Zone Reasoning, and Narrative Prototyping, each with a specified form of engagement with generative AI. Rather than displacing established design-thinking, design-fiction, and responsible-innovation approaches, the framework complements them by sequencing literary reading, Socratic deliberation, and narrative construction as practices proposed to support cognitive, ethical, and imaginative capacities relevant to innovation. NHIP was developed through the author's teaching of innovation classes at the University of Kalba, United Arab Emirates, in which its activities have been implemented as part of routine teaching but have not been formally evaluated. A ten-week illustrative module, with a generative-AI strand running through every pillar, shows how the framework could be operationalised in classroom practice. The article advances, as a hypothesis for empirical testing, the proposition that humanistic pedagogy may help safeguard against cognitive offloading arising from uncritical technology adoption. Testable propositions and implications for curriculum design, faculty development, and empirical validation are discussed.