ABOUT THIS BOOK
Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?
In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.
REVIEWS
“Attentive, engaging, and highly innovative, Creativity on Demand brings an acute ethnographic sensibility to bear on the making of the ‘new’ in contemporary corporate life, showing us, in the process, how anthropology can help us better understand our present-day condition. This is a singularly thought-provoking read.”
— Don Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz
“I’ve been waiting for years for a book like this to come along. Using an approach that neither celebrates innovation nor dismisses it, Creativity on Demand is the first extended critical exploration of a concept with a lot of social force behind it, but—until now—not much ethnographic light illuminating its inner workings. Anyone interested in the political economy of operationalized creativity will find something to run with in this book.”
— Keith Murphy, University of California, Irvine
“Creativity on Demand shines an ethnographic light on the ceaseless production of newness as a quality of contemporary ‘fast’ capitalism. Wilf’s work with innovation consultants is an important contribution to anthropological and other critical studies of business.”
— Andrew Orta, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
"Wilf opens the vast world of innovation consulting in today's capitalism to anthropological analysis. Rather than simply repeat, for instance, the common story of how 3M accidentally invented the wildly successful Post-it Note, Wilf explores a world in which consulting firms use the Post-it example, along with dozens of actual Post-its of various shapes and sizes, in their attempts to foster intentional, routine creativity among their corporate clients. By carefully unpacking workshop interactions, how-to guides, and much more, Wilf shows that innovation consulting has become a central cultural logic of contemporary capitalism, a practice that firms often believe they cannot survive without, even as they just as often doubt its efficacy. While the analysis is sophisticated throughout, ranging widely through theories of cultural change, commodity fetishism, language practices, and more, the main points will be quite understandable to less theoretically inclined readers interested in the actual practice (as opposed to insistent ideologies) of 21st-century capitalism. Creativity on Demand is a useful addition to scholarship and courses in a number of fields beyond anthropology, including design, management, and political economy."
— CHOICE
“Creativity on Demand is an excellent contribution to the subfields of anthropology of work, business anthropology, and economic anthropology.”
— Anthropos
"Creativity on Demand approaches innovation as something that consultancies sell to companies that think that they need it if they are to stay ahead of the pack, or at least not fall behind. The volume, then, is not about what innovation is in any neutral sense, but is about what those consultancies advertise: a concept of what the innovative company is and a set of courses that teach people how to innovate and companies how to encourage it. . . . This is an intriguing analysis of an important aspect of contemporary business beliefs and practices."
— Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0001
[innovation;post-Fordism;commodity fetishism;consumer needs;organization studies;uncertainty;creative arts;jazz music;capitalism]
This chapter introduces the main question the book addresses, namely how to explain the rise in innovation’s popularity together with the mounting suspicion that innovation has become a catch-all phrase that is devoid of meaning. It situates the rise of business innovation in the context of post-Fordist flexible accumulation and argues that the study of business innovation provides an opportunity to contribute to critical studies of capitalism as a future-producing and future-oriented social configuration with respect to three main concerns in such studies: commodity fetishism, “unmet” consumer needs, and the production of the future. The chapter’s first half presents the book’s main argument, the ethnographic setting and fieldwork, and the outline of chapters. Its second half provides a detailed analysis of one historical context that explains the emergence of business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world. It argues that throughout the twentieth century organizational and management theorists gradually began to conceptualize organizations as entities whose logic encompasses uncertainty as a natural component that provides a crucial resource for their survival, and that a number of organizational theorists consequently turned to the creative arts in general, and jazz music in particular, in search for adequate organizational models.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan: Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0002
[imagination;abduction;cultural evolution;disruption;anthropology;archaeology;organization studies;sociology of science;bricolage;innovation]
This chapter highlights two processes that account for the productivity of one specific innovation strategy. The first process helps the innovator imagine new objects by means of the deformation of existing products according to a well-defined procedure. The second process is systematic abduction. Faced with the deformed objects the innovator created by means of the first process, he must think of the functions those objects might be able to perform for a hypothetical consumer such that their strange forms would make sense. The chapter contextualizes the emergence of this productive innovation strategy in the broader hyper-competitive world of business innovation that is dominated by the idea that any existing business organization faces the immediate danger of being undone by up-and-coming competitors that are about to launch new “disruptive” products. Consequently, business organizations must prepare themselves for imminent crises whose exact nature they cannot know until they emerge by constantly producing the potential solutions for them in advance in the form of a steady stream of ideas for new products. At stake is a new engine of cultural evolution and change that challenges existing approaches to innovation in the sociology of science, anthropology (bricolage), archaeology, and organization studies.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. “Putting This Mess into a Structure”: Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0003
[macrosociological order;cultural contradiction;Romantic ethos;professional ethos;ritual;semiosis;workshop;innovation;communicative event]
Innovation consultants must not only develop productive innovation strategies but also contend with the macrosociological landscapes in which business innovation is anchored. Set within a modern Western normative framework, consultants’ promise to build a stable corporate culture of innovation and organizational creativity embodies a basic cultural contradiction because modern Romantic normative ideals of creative agency connote unpredictability and resistance to formalization and routinization. Against this backdrop, the chapter analyzes the ways in which innovation workshop facilitators attempt to reframe this cultural contradiction and thus encourage workshop participants to inhabit the—on the surface, counter-intuitive—idea that innovation can and should be routinized, formalized, and rationalized. They do so by means of different ritual-semiotic communicative events. They first bring into being the specific macrosociological order that opposes a Romantic ethos (associated with mercurial human creativity) and a professional ethos (associated with rule-governed rationality). During the workshop this macrosociological order then becomes the basis for suggested transformations in the roles that participants inhabit with respect to innovation, namely from associating innovation with a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to accepting at its end that a professional ethos can lead to successful innovation as a permanent feature of the organization.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. “Listening to the Voice of the Product”: Human Creativity Displaced
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0004
[Romantic creativity;business management;evolution;potential;consumers;commodity fetishism;forms;products;innovation;needs]
This chapter argues that although it might appear that Romantic creativity has been eradicated from the innovation process by means of its algorithmic-like structure, in practice such creativity has become this process’s condition of possibility. Focusing on a specific innovation strategy as it is explained in a business management book, the chapter argues that this strategy transforms human creativity into a manageable and reliable resource by displacing it from the innovator and consumer to the non-human elements of the innovation process, namely the products that are in need of innovation. This strategy stipulates that all the information the innovator needs in order to generate ideas for new products can be found in the history of the evolution of the forms of past successful products. This evolution reveals crucial information about existing products’ “creative potential” to develop into new products that will tap into consumers’ “unmet needs.” The innovator thus transforms the product into a quasi-person endowed with a creative potential for development—a new kind of commodity fetishism, and the consumer into a static, quasi-object whose needs emerge deterministically and can be inferred in advance by the innovator based on the systematic analysis of the product.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0005
[Post-it note;design thinking;decontextualization;pseudo-data;ritual;insights;templates;post-Fordism;pragmatic ambiguity;innovation]
This chapter analyzes the most ubiquitously used material artifact in business innovation, the Post-it note. It argues that Post-it notes have become ubiquitous in design thinking because they enable innovators to quickly generate insights in line with post-Fordist ideals of speed. First, Post-it notes enable innovators to produce pseudo-data and to decouple data from the market under the guise of its reflection. In the course of the innovation process, innovators represent data about consumers by means of a series of textual artifacts of decreasing dimensions until the data are represented in the form of single words and even single graphic sketches on single Post-it notes. This kind of representation results in decontextualization and pragmatic ambiguity. Once the innovator loses the context, he or she can move through the ideation phase more quickly. Second, Post-it notes’ weak adhesive properties enable the innovator to arrange such pseudo-data on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like such as a two-by-two matrix or a Venn diagram. The experimentation with Post-it notes on such templates results in a quickly generated “ritual insight,” i.e. an insight that receives its validity from the conventional prestige of the readymade visual template that underlies it.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Clutter: Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0006
[mediation;material artifacts;flexibility;information flow;innovators;self;workspace;expertise;thought processes;clutter]
This chapter addresses the puzzling fact that although business innovation is often decoupled from the market to which it purport to refer, this decoupling has only partially undermined the perception of its value in and outside the business world. The reason lies in innovators’ efforts to signal to clients by means of different performative practices that “innovation is now taking place.” The chapter argues that innovators use specific material artifacts and communicative practices to mediate the notion that their expertise is based in the ideals of flexibility, speed, minimalism, free information flow, and organizational creativity. However, these acts of mediation also have unintended consequences. They clutter the work of innovation and create centers of gravity, opacity, and rigidness. In other words, they both mediate and undermine the ideals with which innovators would like to be associated. The chapter explores this contradiction as it finds expression in innovators’ efforts to mediate their workspace, expertise, thought processes, and selves as organizationally creative.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. “Life Design”: The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0007
[life-design;design thinking;technology;self-transformation;happiness;Silicon Valley;self-innovation;prototyping;brainstorming]
This chapter looks at the migration of norms and practices of business innovation outside the business world as a consequence of their rising prestige. It provides an in-depth analysis of “life-design,” a set of commercially successful strategies developed by Silicon Valley innovators to help individuals “innovate” their lives and thereby achieve happiness. The chapter argues that the same modern-Romantic notions of the self that provided consultants with a model of creative potentiality and the cultural conditions of possibility for developing design thinking strategies for innovating technologies are now ironically being transformed as a result of the fact that the self has become the subject of those strategies as if it were a technology in need of innovation. The chapter unpacks what reflexivity means for the self as technology, what constitutes a well-designed life, what prototyping potential future lives entails, how the ideals of speed and instantaneity that suffuse business innovation affect notions of self-transformation when one’s life is approached as an object of innovation, what the presentation of self in the quest for a well-designed life means when it is the object of brainstorming sessions, and what socioeconomic conditions of possibility enable such a method of “self-innovation,” to begin with.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion: Institutional Myths of Innovation
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.003.0008
[institutions;myth;ritual;innovation;uncertainty;organizations;anthropology;design;critique]
The conclusion first teases out a number of theoretical points about business innovation. It then provides a general sociological argument about the function that innovation strategies perform in the business world, namely that of an institutional myth that organizations are ready to embrace as a ritualized, though not necessarily effective, way to cope with the uncertainty and ambiguity that pervade business innovation. The conclusion ends by drawing parallels between knowledge production in anthropology and the arguments made in the book about knowledge production in business innovation. Based on this comparison, it argues that business innovation provides a cautionary tale in light of which recent calls made by anthropologists to revamp and “innovate” anthropological training and work in the model of design should be critiqued.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
