In Europe, the tremendous success of the innovative scientific approach to technological development naturally led to the hypothesis that the same approach could also be useful for the understanding and control of social systems. In the French enlightenment of the 18th century Marquis de Condorcet tried in his "Law of Progress" to construct a scientific theory of social evolution following the success of the Cartesian world-view developed a century earlier. This was probably one of the first attempt to use the forces of scientific reason to control a complex social system like the French society.
The second scientific theory of human historical development and organization came from Marx and Engels and their historical and dialectic materialism. Again they were clearly inspired and motivated by the success of Newtonian mechanics and Cartesian logic. Lenin and Mao tried to implement this scientific (better "science inspired") theory in some of the largest social experiments in human history. Theoretically this could have been an innovation on the higher level of a whole society (and eventually all of mankind) since the performance (or fitness) parameter would not be defined on an individual level but at the level of "the masses". The hope was to improve the well being of the proletariat at the cost of the (numerically smaller) class of the bourgeoisie. Thus in the average everyone would be better off. Unfortunately simple averaging in complex systems usually does not yield the average result
Today in hindsight it seems to be evident that all of these experiment failed because the paradigm of reductionistic, deterministic, and linear mechanics cannot be used to control complex adaptive systems like any form of human organization. Central planning can work for linear systems but not for complex, self-organizing adaptive systems including self-referential feedback loops: Those who implement the control have an "evolutionary advantage" to interpret and modify the original rules to their own advantage. In other words: any homogeneous state ("everyone is equal") is intrinsically unstable if the system is not in equilibrium. Physical force can maintain a meta-stable state over o period of time (for instance the coexistence of the official soviet economy with fabricated production figures and the "shadow economy" in the same country) but eventually relatively small perturbations will induce a rapid transition to a new stable state.
The collapse of the communist system has been seen by many as a support of the free market system. On the other hand a perfectly "free" market system experiences similar instabilities towards (self-organized) "pattern formation" in the form of increasingly larger (legal and illegal) business organizations. Already today the financial resources of international businesses are comparable or larger than national budgets of intermediate size countries. The number of mega-mergers that can be seen today might be an indication for a shift of the evolutionary fitness parameters favoring increasingly larger organizational units. According to our earlier general definition, merging of two companies can be interpreted as innovation.