Chasing Innovation
One early September day I finally managed to have a long conversation with David, a business innovation consultant in his midthirties. In 2012, after pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics and a graduate degree in design, David had founded Newfound, a design and innovation consultancy firm, together with two business partners. During the three months before our conversation, I had participated in different innovation workshops organized by Newfound in New York. David was the most verbal and articulate among the innovation consultants I worked with, and I was eager to have a one-on-one conversation with him. However, it was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting because his consultancy practice at the time of my fieldwork required him to travel extensively inside and outside the United States. One afternoon, however, he texted me to say that if I still wanted to interview him, he could make himself available during a twohour slot the following morning. I immediately responded with “ Yes!” The next morning I arrived at the same shared workspace on the twenty-first floor of a new office building in Manhattan’s midtown in which Newfound’s workshops took place. I found David sitting in a nook next to a floor-toceiling window, looking at the busy street below. Upon seeing me, he smiled and without further ado said “Go for it.” I was not disappointed by our conversation. David responded in detail to each of my questions, taking them in directions that I had not anticipated. As our conversation drew to a close, I asked him what the participants in the innovation workshops he facilitates find the hardest to learn. “ The hardest thing of all is finding ways to do this in your job,” he immediately responded. “Some people come to us and say, ‘I want a job in innovation.’ 2 / Introduction And I’m like, ‘There are no jobs in innovation! Go be innovative in whatever you do!’ ” David’s tone became frustrated. “ The world deserves people who know something about a thing and then choose to innovate that thing. Like, HR managers should be innovative HR managers. And product managers should innovate methods of product management. People should be innovating in place!” He went on to explain that “people look at what we do and think of innovation as something separate from the field of knowledge and experience that they have. But, in fact,” he argued, “you gotta have a minefield of knowledge and experience to innovate—people, teams, organizations, change management.” David paused for a second and added, “and innovation processes: so I get to innovate innovation, you know?” he laughed. “I’ve been doing this for seven years, and I’m an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this.” After the interview, as I walked along Broadway to the Times Square subway station, I kept thinking about David’s words. David argued that innovation has become such a popular buzzword that everyone—companies and people—wanted to become innovative. His words resonated with some of the flickering advertisements, billboards, and storefronts that surrounded me on the busy street and that announced new products, services, and technologies by using some form of the word innovation. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a more ubiquitous trope than innovation in today’s business world. A 2012 article in the Wall Street Journal presented data that pointed to innovation’s exponential increase in visibility: A search of annual and quarterly reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows companies mentioned some form of the word “innovation” 33,528 times [in 2011], which was a 64% increase from five years before that. More than 250 books with “innovation” in the title have been published in the last three months, most of them dealing with business, according to a search of Amazon.com. . . . Apple Inc. and Google Inc. mentioned innovation 22 times and 14 times, respectively, in their most recent annual reports. But they were matched by Procter & Gamble Co. (22 times), Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. (21 times) and Campbell Soup Co. (18 times). . . . Four in 10 executives say their company now has a chief innovation officer. (Kwoh 2012) However, later, sitting in the subway train on my way to Brooklyn, I realized that David suggested that the immense popularity of innovation has become a double-edged sword. People often came to him thinking they could innovate independently of domains of professional practice and indepth knowledge of such context-specific domains because innovation’s The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 3 popularity turned it into a reified notion, a kind of catchall phrase that was fast becoming devoid of meaning. His assessment resonates with a widespread suspicion. In tandem with the data about the rising ubiquity of the notion of innovation, the same Wall Street Journal article argued that “like the once ubiquitous buzzwords ‘synergy’ and ‘optimization,’ innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché—if it isn’t one already” (Kwoh 2012). A 2013 article in the Atlantic went as far as suggesting that although “mentions of innovation are resurgent,” “actual innovation might be in decline” (Green 2013). Quoting a George Mason University economist, the article argued that since the 1970s, “the forward march of technological progress has hit something of a dry spell, regardless of what all the talk about innovation may indicate.” It concluded with the puzzling fact that “measurable innovation might be on the decline, but, for some reason, we just can’t stop talking about it” (Green 2013). Finally, back home in Park Slope, as I was transcribing the interview with David I noticed a third dimension to his commentary. Although David first argued that people erroneously think that there is “a job in innovation,” he then acknowledged that his job is precisely such a job. David first claimed that people should be innovating in their own domains of professional practice and that to do so they must have in-depth knowledge of these context-specific domains: the “people, teams, organizations, [and] change management.” At this point, however, he suddenly paused and added “and innovation processes,” thus turning the spotlight to himself. Knowledge of “innovation processes” was something innovation consultants must be intimately familiar with if they wanted to “innovate innovation”—that is, to offer their clients better and more advanced strategies of innovation. David’s expert knowledge was thus a metalevel kind of knowledge of innovation, one that could be applied not only to consumer products and processes across different domains but also to itself. David belongs to the steadily growing number of innovation consultants, a professional group of people who help companies innovate their products, services, and structures by means of general, rule-governed innovation strategies that transcend specific contexts. As the Wall Street Journal article noted, “the innovation trend has given birth to an attendant consulting industry, and Fortune 100 companies pay innovation consultants $300,000 to $1 million for work on a single project, which can amount to $1 million to $10 million a year,” according to estimates (Kwoh 2012). Thus, reading the full transcription of the interview with David later that night, it struck me as provocative of more questions than answers. How can we explain the fact that according to David, the popularity of the idea 4 / Introduction of innovation has led people to want to master innovation as if it were a “thing” that could be abstracted from the context of different business practices when he presented himself as someone whose professional practice revolved around the development of innovation strategies that transcended the specific contexts of business practices? What should we make of the fact that David emphasized that he has been offering innovation consulting services for a number of years and yet still considers himself “an amateur. So you cannot just show up and do this,” when the notion that one can “just show up and do this” has been popularized in large part because of the many short innovation workshops and executive training sessions that innovation consultants such as David offer to business executives? Lastly, how should we reconcile the widespread suspicion that innovation has lost its specificity together with the rise of numerous innovation consulting firms that have developed highly specific innovation strategies as well as with the fact that many of these consulting firms have been successfully selling their services to different kinds of business organizations, from small start-ups to established Fortune 500 companies? An Undertheorized Dimension of Post-Fordist Flexible Accumulation Since the 1980s, post-Fordism has been at the center of critical studies of capitalism. In this context, scholars have focused on the nature and implications of the development of new strategies to reduce further the turnover time of capital, that is, the time it takes for capital to complete a cycle from the capitalist’s investment of capital in the means of production to the return of capital to the capitalist after the sale of commodities (Azari-Rad 1999). Their analytic focus has tended to be on the development of more efficient production and distribution technologies. For example, they have discussed the transition to part-time and temporary labor force (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012; Ho 2009), cheaper manufacturing of goods in small batches and new distribution systems such as just-in-time inventory-flow delivery systems (Elam 1994; Shead 2017), geographical dispersal and mobility (Esser and Hirsch 1994), and the ability to take advantage of up-todate information through computerization and electronic means of communication (Zaloom 2006; Holmes and Marcus 2006). However, post-Fordist flexible accumulation depends on reducing the turnover time of capital not only via more efficient production and distribution technologies but also via a higher rate of product innovation. Organi- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 5 zations must not only instantaneously respond to but also orchestrate and anticipate market changes by generating a constant stream of ideas for new products and services. The plethora of studies of post-Fordism has thus left relatively undertheorized a key dimension of post-Fordist flexible accumulation, namely, the “acceleration in the pace of product innovation together with the exploration of highly specialized and small-scale market niches” (Harvey 1990, 156). Against this backdrop, what kind of professional expertise might emerge in response to organizations’ need to routinize the fast production of ideas for new products and services? How might such an expertise help organizations generate solutions to future crises whose nature they cannot know in advance, namely, the introduction by their competitors of new products and services that can upend their operations? Put more broadly, what kind of professional expertise might help organizations prepare themselves for and constantly generate the unpredictable in a predictable way, the future in the present, the unknown by means of the known? Scholars have argued at length that the post-Fordist development of more efficient production and distribution technologies has had concrete societal implications. For example, the transition to part-time and temporary labor forces has affected workers’ well-being in numerous ways (Muehlebach and Shoshan 2012). Against this backdrop, how might the promise of the fast innovation of any entity by means of abstract, rule-governed strategies affect cultural notions of newness as well as individuals’ relation to their world—including their own lives—when such a world and lives are seen through the prism of endless innovation within reach? The very idea of the intentional design of organizational structures meant to routinize the fast production of new cultural entities takes us to a relatively uncharted theoretical domain in cultural anthropology. Anthropologists have tended to view innovation as the result of copying errors in the process of social learning and the diffusion of social practices (Boas 1896; Kroeber 1940) or as the contingent, loosely guided, and often unconscious product of individuals’ experimentation with existing practices and constraints (often glossed as “improvisation” or “emergence”) in response to unexpected new situations and crises (White 1943, 339–40; Mead 1953; LéviStrauss 1966, 17–19; Bateson 1967, 148; Bourdieu 1977, 79; Chibnik 1981; Gell 1998, 215; Hannerz 1992; Hallam and Ingold 2007; Pandian 2015).1 In light of this intellectual tradition, what theory might account for a professional expertise that turns on the ability to systematize the fast production of ideas for new cultural entities by means of the development of rule-governed strategies that become part of the organization’s everyday practice? 6 / Introduction The Book’s Argument Based on a four-year ethnographic study of routinized business innovation norms and practices as they find expression in the work of innovation consultants, I address these and additional questions, offering a threefold argument. First, the consultants I worked with were not selling their clients snake oil that entailed little more than the appearance of entrepreneurship and an organizational cool branded with an unspecific catchall phrase. Rather, they were busy developing and helping their clients learn to implement highly specific and rule-governed strategies of generating and imagining ideas for new products and services. Such strategies problematize a number of assumptions about both the business organization and the creative imagination. On the one hand, scholars have rarely viewed creative imagination as one of business organizations’ key dimensions. Yet the rise of norms and practices of business innovation, in which ideation strategies play an important role, suggests that creative imagination is fast becoming one of business organizations’ key components. On the other hand, scholars have often conceptualized creative imagination in terms of fleeting liminality, evanescence, a radical individual property, and a horizon that is removed from the here and now. Yet many strategies of business innovation bring creative imagination into the office or conference room as a stable property or “technology” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009) that a number of people can generate, share, and debate together for a sustained length of time. Business innovation thus turns out to be a sphere of professional practice that generates new cultural entities by reconciling a professional ethos—with its ideals of rationality, systematicity, and reliability—and a modern-Romantic creative ethos, with its ideals of unpredictable emergence (Wilf 2014a). The possibility of such reconciliation has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public and played a key role in the rise of a professional class of innovation consultants. Second, many consultants’ substantial achievements notwithstanding, contemporary business innovation takes place in an economic and organizational environment that prizes speed and instantaneous results. This environment significantly shapes the social life of business innovation. Clients’ pressure for immediate results pushes innovation consultants to streamline the production of insights and ideas for new products and services. They consequently abstract and decontextualize the innovation process from the market to which it purports to refer. Although consultants argue that their strategies are oriented toward and take into account the consumer, the latter is often erased in the process of innovation. I show two The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 7 forms of this erasure. In the first, the innovation process discards the need to engage with end users altogether because of a belief that all the needed information about future innovative products and services already inheres in existing products and services. In the second, although the innovation process begins with data collected from end users, these data undergo textual transformations that gradually decontextualize them from any meaningful connection to users. Third, in addition to decoupling the innovation process from the market, some strands of business innovation have become self-reflexive and self-sustaining professional practices whose role is to mediate post-Fordist normative ideals of speed, instantaneity, and creative flexibility both to innovators and to their clients in addition to, and often at the expense of, generating end results that can actually be monetized. The rhetorical power of such practices to signal to clients and to innovators that “innovation is now taking place” emanates from their multimodal resonance with widespread ideologies of organizational creativity. This rhetorical power is responsible for business innovation’s contemporary status as a bulletproof panacea for any entity in need of innovation, including one’s life and self. These different, interrelated, and sometimes contradictory dimensions of routinized business innovation underlie David’s commentary. David complained that people think that innovation is “a thing” that can be abstracted from contextual factors, yet he presented his own professional practice as one that has reached the kind of level of generality that makes innovation appear to be “a thing” that transcends contexts, a perception that has also been encouraged by business innovation’s self-reflexivity, reification, and decoupling from the market. David lamented the fact that people think they can quickly master the principles of innovation and that they do not understand that business innovation consists of highly specialized skills and procedures, yet it is innovation consultants who have formulated easily learnable principles and recipes of innovation, disseminated them in relatively short training sessions, and applied them in concrete innovation sessions to quickly generate insights. Routinized business innovation is thus neither the empty shell that its detractors claim it to be nor is it the holy grail of organizational success that its supporters insist it is. Rather, innovation consultants constantly need to negotiate the tension between their desire to come up with specific practices that could lead to ideas for new monetizable products and services— a goal that requires time and sensitivity to context—and the need to speed up the innovation process and signal to their clients and to themselves that “innovation is now taking place”—an achievement that requires them to 8 / Introduction decontextualize, abstract, and reify the innovation process. To understand this complexity, an ethnographic approach that is sensitive to innovators’ everyday practice is needed. As the author of a recent Wired magazine article noted, “the overuse and generalization of the term ‘innovation’ has led to a loss of understanding of what it is we need when we say we need more innovation. We lose sight of the specific skills and behavior needed to be innovative. . . . We should start talking about innovation as a series of separate skills and behaviors” (O’Bryan 2013). Against this backdrop, I provide a detailed analysis of the skills and behaviors of business innovation consultants based on participant observation in a number of key institutional sites in which they develop, crystalize, and apply those skills and behaviors and inculcate them to business people who are later supposed to implement them in their own organizations. In doing so, I unpack both the potentialities and cultural contradictions of routinized business innovation and tease out their theoretical and practical implications. Commodity Fetishism, “Unmet Consumer Needs,” and the Production of the Future The study of business innovation provides an opportunity to engage with and contribute to critical studies of capitalism as a future-producing and future-oriented social configuration. One focus in this strand of research has been capitalism’s future-oriented discursive practices. For example, in his study of biotechnological start-ups in the United States and India, Sunder Rajan highlights “the grammar of biocapital,” which he describes as a promissory futuristic discourse, an orientation to the future when there is nothing in the present that prefigures it (Sunder Rajan 2006). This orientation is based in an ideology and culture of risk taking (Sunder Rajan 2006, 110; Comaroff and Comaroff 2000; Appadurai 2011; Miyazaki 2007; Maurer 2002; Riles 2004; Preda 2009) and is a condition of possibility for biotechnological start-ups, which depend on significant capital investment when there are no tangible products and revenues in the present that can justify such an investment (see also Taussig, Hoeyer, and Helmreich 2013). Other studies have focused on the production of new subjectivities for capitalism. For example, Rudnyckyj has studied the ways in which moderate Muslims in Southeast Asia learn to reconfigure their approach to Islam and their understanding of themselves as Muslims and thus, “to make the religion compatible with principles for corporate success found in Euro-American management texts, self-help manuals, and life-coaching sessions” (Rudnyckyj 2010). Similarly, Dumit has argued that the pharmaceutical industry expands its The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 9 market by making Americans perceive themselves as subjects who are inherently ill and in need of chronic treatment (Dumit 2012). I complement these studies by arguing that innovation consultants produce the future not only by means of discursive practices and the production of new subjectivities but also by engaging with existing products as future-producing sites in which this future already inheres in embryonic form, awaiting the innovator’s intervention to help it materialize by means of specific practices that involve the innovator’s corporeality and imagination. The conditions of possibility that underlie this approach include culturally specific notions of form, potentiality, evolution, determinism, and prediction. This mode of producing the future provides an opportunity to engage with what Marx called commodity fetishism (Marx 1978). Marx argued that under capitalism, commodities appear to have a nature or life of their own that is reflected in their price. Although it is human labor that is responsible for products’ existence and “life,” this labor remains concealed from consumers (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002). Recent studies of commodity fetishism have tended to focus on branding, that is, strategies of imbuing specific products with quasi-human personality traits with which consumers can identify (Arvidsson 2006; Foster 2007; Lury 2004; Moore 2003; Manning 2010; Lee and LiPuma 2002; Gershon 2017). Against this backdrop, I theorize a different form of commodity fetishism in the course of which innovators conceptually transform existing products into quasi persons that are endowed with a unique creative potential for developing into new products. The innovator does not assign specific personality traits to a specific product but rather invests it with a potential for creative development that, to be sure, is responsible for its present form but also for its future, potentially highly different forms. These innovation strategies migrate to spheres outside of the business world, too, such as that of self-help, where commodities and technologies eventually become models of creative development that human individuals are asked to emulate, as if products’ potential for creative development were antecedent to that of human individuals. Business innovation’s future-oriented approach ultimately turns on efforts to tap into “unmet consumer needs.” Scholars have studied “consumer needs” and their production under capitalism primarily through the prism of the ways in which marketers and advertisers recruit consumers to specific roles and encourage them to experience and inhabit needs associated with those roles, which existing products can presumably satisfy (Mazzarella 2003; Moore 2003; Applbaum 2003; Lury 2004). I highlight instead the coconstitution of products and consumers in the course of the 10 / Introduction innovation process. Ideas for new products shape, and are shaped by, innovators’ ideas about consumers. Future products and “unmet consumer needs” thus come to share an interrelatedly emergent and contingent nature that is nevertheless shaped by the specific post-Fordist business environment in which it is anchored and by the innovator who mediates between them and whose self and expertise, too, are constituted in this process of mediation. The Ethnographic Setting and Fieldwork Beginning in April 2012, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with four innovation consulting firms, mainly in New York City. The bulk of the fieldwork took place with two of these firms, Newfound and Brandnew.2 Newfound was founded in 2012. It has offered innovation corporate training as well as contract work with individual companies on specific projects. Since its foundation, it has collaborated with companies from the banking, apparel, food, education, and tourism sectors and industries on a wide range of projects. Its founders and facilitators base their expertise in design, business management, and advertising. They trace most of their professional lineage to design thinking, a highly influential user-centered design and innovation method that is widely associated with the iconic Silicon Valley innovation consultancy firm IDEO and Stanford’s Institute of Design.3 This lineage has ties to the psychological study of creativity in that design thinking’s key method of ideation—brainstorming—is embedded in the context of the psychological study of creative problem-solving in the mid-twentieth century (Osborn 1953, xiv). I attended four different innovation workshops given by Newfound, the longest of which extended to five weeks. Participants in these workshops came mostly from the start-up sector and the creative industries. The cost of Newfound’s workshops was in the range of a few hundred dollars. Each workshop was usually led by two facilitators and attended by fifteen participants. The shorter workshops focused on the transmission of abstract principles, whereas the longer ones were structured around specific problems presented by real clients. By trying to solve a client’s problem by means of the innovation strategies inculcated in a workshop, participants hoped to gain hands-on experience and what they considered to be crucial skills in the contemporary marketplace. Clients hoped to benefit from the insights generated in the workshops and were consequently willing to underwrite some of their costs. Brandnew was founded in 1994. Since its founding it has collaborated with major companies from different sectors on a vast spectrum of con- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 11 sumer products and services, one of which has become a standard of innovation in the field of consumer electronics. Its facilitators base their expertise in cognitive science and the study of creative problem-solving with a focus on engineering problems in addition to business management. Participants in its workshops and training sessions tended to be senior executives in large, established companies, some of which were Fortune 500 companies. They were mostly C-level executives (e.g., Chief Innovation Officers) with business management degrees. The cost of Brandnew’s workshops was in the range of a few thousand dollars. Each workshop was usually led by four facilitators and attended by twenty-five participants. In addition to attending Brandnew’s workshops, I participated in a course on business innovation in one of the top five US business schools.4 The course focused on the core principles of Brandnew’s signature innovation strategy. It lasted six weeks and was attended by close to seventy students. It has been offered a few times a year at this school. Although this book does not provide a systematic comparison between the two consultancies, juxtaposed, Newfound and Brandnew offer a good view of the wide spectrum of routinized business innovation strategies and services that are now prevalent in the business world and of the wide range of executives and entrepreneurs interested in mastering and incorporating these strategies. Newfound’s focus on design thinking provides a window into an innovation strategy that has become highly popular both within and outside the business world. In contrast, Brandnew provides insights into consultancies that offer more specialized proprietary innovation strategies. The innovators who work for Brandnew explicitly reject design thinking and its adherence to brainstorming as a method of creative ideation in favor of a much more systematic, quasi-algorithmic approach to creative problem-solving inspired by the field of engineering and cognitive science. Their “no-nonsense” approach found expression in the fact that Brandnew’s workshops that I attended took place in dull, windowless hotel conference rooms, whereas Newfound’s workshops took place in a trendy shared workspace in a new office building—the kind of workspace that has become identified with the start-up sector and the creative industries. Equipped with floor-to-ceiling windows, open spaces, long communal tables, espresso machines, games, and other forms of a “fun” atmosphere, Newfound’s choice of location reflects the younger demographics of its clients, which stands in contrast to Brandnew’s clients, who tend to be senior executives in established companies.5 Inasmuch as the consulting firms I worked with collaborated with major companies in a wide array of sectors, they provide a platform from which 12 / Introduction it is possible to generalize about the normative ideals and practices of routinized business innovation in the contemporary moment. That said, I am not suggesting that the innovation strategies that these consulting firms develop and disseminate exhaust the entire spectrum of innovation practices that exist now. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that the scope of the analysis I present in this book is intentionally limited in two ways. First, the routinized business innovation strategies developed by the innovation consultants I worked with are highly abstract, formalized, and characterized by rule-governed rationality. These features make those strategies applicable to products and services across different business sectors. Such strategies are thus different from “in-house,” frequently informal innovation strategies and routines developed by many companies that are meant to be applied only to the specific products and services those companies produce and that are not immediately relevant to companies in other business sectors (cf. Moeran and Christensen 2013). Consider, for example, Google’s famous “20% time” policy, which Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, highlighted in their 2004 IPO letter: “We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google. This empowers them to be more creative and innovative” (quoted in D’Onfro 2015). To begin, this innovation strategy is highly unspecific, offering no clear procedures for innovation save for the general allocation of “free” time. Second, it is characterized by a low level of routinization. It does not get “formal management oversight—Googlers aren’t forced to work on additional projects and there are no written guidelines about it” (D’Onfro 2015). Indeed, it appears that only “10% of Googlers are using” this policy because “it became too difficult for employees to take time off from their normal jobs.” In addition, as a former top Google executive put it, for those who do use this policy, “it’s really 120% time,” that is, 20 percent additional time to their normal jobs. Third, even if it were routinized and enforced, this innovation policy could not be easily applied in other business sectors, such as the pharmaceutical industry, where a highly different production model prevails and a high level of collaboration between many people and coordination with regulatory authorities is required. Thus, in comparison with “in-house,” informal innovation strategies and routines, innovation workshops and business school courses provide a vantage point from which it is possible to discern higher-level normative ideals and practices of business innovation as innovators reflexively construct and understand them. The scope of the analysis I present in this book is intentionally limited in a second way. I focus primarily on the idea-generation dimension of rou- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 13 tinized business innovation, although in practice successful innovation consists of other dimensions, such as market analysis, feasibility considerations, regulatory issues, and organizational politics and resources (Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002). Indeed, it is indicative that although in practice, idea generation plays a relatively minor role in the overall innovation process (Schumpeter 1943, 132), it has almost always remained the primary focus of the innovation strategies that the consultancies I worked with developed as well as the dimension that their clients were most eager to learn, master, and implement in their home organizations. Rather than assume that this discrepancy distorts the reality of business innovation, I take it to be an important dimension of this reality, one that is indicative of the cultural order of business innovation that begs for a detailed explanation and analysis. The rise of innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world as well as the public fascination with innovation have largely been propelled by the fact that norms and practices of business innovation resonate with powerful ideologies of creative agency and selfhood in the modern West. A focus on the idea-generation dimension of the innovation process is thus justified both by this dimension’s saliency in the field of business innovation consulting services and by the role it plays in business innovation’s broader appeal outside the business world. During my fieldwork I attended innovation workshops, training sessions, courses, and conferences. Although participants and facilitators in Brandnew’s and Newfound’s workshops were aware of my presence as an ethnographer, I engaged in data collection, ideation sessions, data analysis, and presentation of final insights to clients as a full participant. I was paired with other participants and worked in teams on specific innovation problems. I complemented these forms of direct participant observation with formal interviews and many informal conversations with innovation consultants and the participants in the innovation sessions and workshops they organized. Against the backdrop of the lack of specificity in critical discussions about business innovation, my purpose is to describe and give voice to what innovation consultants do and how they understand and explain to others what they do as well as to anthropologically theorize this ethnographic material in order to better account for routinized business innovation as a salient contemporary cultural phenomenon. Outline of Chapters The book is divided into three parts that reflect its threefold argument. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the concrete innovation strategies innovation 14 / Introduction consultants develop and inculcate as well as on the cultural contradictions with which they need to contend and the discursive means with which they do so. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the ways in which the contemporary business environment’s emphasis on speedy and instantaneous results shapes the social life of innovation strategies, which become pervaded by decontextualization and increasingly decoupled from the market to which they purport to refer. Finally, chapters 5 and 6 focus on the self-reflexive and performative nature of business innovation, including the ways in which it shapes the innovator’s self and notions of selfhood in the wider public. The second half of this introduction provides a detailed analysis of one historical context that explains the emergence of business innovation as a key dimension of the contemporary business world. This context revolves around a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization throughout the twentieth century with respect to the role of uncertainty. Until the mid-twentieth century, organizational and management theorists approached uncertainty as an undesirable feature of organizations, one that must be eliminated as soon as possible. In contrast, in the second half of the twentieth century, they began to conceptualize organizations as entities whose logic encompasses uncertainty as a natural component that provides a crucial resource for their survival by allowing them to cope with unforeseen events in their internal and external environments and even to generate unforeseen events in the form of ideas for new products. Organizational design consequently focused on developing structures that could integrate and generate uncertainty as a routine dimension of organizations’ logic of operation by tapping into and harnessing employees’ creative agency. A number of organizational theorists turned to the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular in search of adequate organizational models. Chapter 1 unpacks in detail the results of these conceptual transformations as they find expression in the radical productivity of the innovation strategies developed by consultants when they are enacted in practice. Drawing on ethnographic examples from one of Brandnew’s workshops in which its signature innovation strategy was inculcated and put to use, the chapter highlights two procedures that account for this strategy’s productivity. The first procedure helps the innovator imagine new products by means of the deformation of existing products according to a series of well-defined steps. The innovator’s strict adherence to a highly focused, rule-governed procedure of imagination and his complete agnosticism to the status of the entities that he deforms by means of this procedure account for the latter’s potential for radical productivity. The second procedure is systematic ab- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 15 duction. Abduction is the reasoning process typically theorized in the context of scientific practice in the course of which the scientist, in view of a strange situation, forms a hypothesis such that if it were true the situation would cease to be strange. Faced with the deformed objects the innovator created by means of the first procedure, 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. Brandnew’s innovation strategy in effect systematizes and professionalizes abduction. The chapter contextualizes the emergence of this productive organizational structure in the broader hypercompetitive 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 who are about to launch new “disruptive” products. This framework requires business organizations to 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 and services. However, 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 specifically Western modern normative framework, consultants’ promise to build and foster 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. Their promise to help corporations build a culture of innovation that will generate a stable pipeline of ideas for new products and services is thus the promise to routinize that which ideologically cannot be routinized and whose value is precisely in its resistance to being routinized and professionalized. Against this backdrop, chapter 2 draws on fieldwork in Brandnew’s workshop to analyze the ways in which workshop facilitators attempt to reframe this cultural contradiction and thus encourage workshop participants to inhabit the—on the surface, counterintuitive—idea that innovation can and should be routinized, formalized, and rationalized. They do so by means of different ritual 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 16 / Introduction that a professional ethos can lead to successful innovation as a permanent feature of the organization. In chapter 3 I argue that although it might appear that Romantic notions of creativity have been eradicated from Brandnew’s innovation strategy by means of the latter’s algorithmic-like structure, in practice those notions have become this strategy’s very condition of possibility, albeit in a different and rather hidden guise. Focusing on Brandnew’s innovation strategy as it is explained in a business management book, I argue that this strategy transforms human creativity, understood as an unruly property, into a manageable and reliable resource by displacing it from the innovator and consumer to the nonhuman elements of the innovation process, namely, the products and services that are in need of innovation. Brandnew’s consultants argue that all the information the innovator needs in order to generate ideas for future successful products can be found in the history of the evolution of existing successful products. This evolution reveals crucial information about products’ “creative potential” to develop into new products that will tap into consumers’ “unmet needs” before consumers know that they have those needs. The innovator consequently is not required to engage with consumers at all in the ideation phase of the innovation process, only with products. At stake is a double inversion in which the innovator transforms the product into a quasi person endowed with a unique creative potential for development and growth and the consumer into a static, inert, quasi object whose needs and wants emerge deterministically and can be algorithmically inferred in advance by the innovator based on the rule-governed analysis of the product. Creativity is thereby both retained and tamed. The decontextualization that characterizes Brandnew’s innovation strategy can also be found in innovation strategies such as design thinking that, in contrast to it, explicitly emphasize the importance of empathizing with consumers by directly engaging with them. As I demonstrate in chapter 4, at the core of this decontextualization stands the most ubiquitously used material artifact in business innovation, namely, the Post-it note. Drawing on fieldwork in one of Newfound’s workshops, I argue that whereas existing explanations attribute the Post-it note’s ubiquity to the fact that it is a convenient tool with which to conduct brainstorming sessions, an important reason for its omnipresence lies elsewhere: it enables innovators to quickly generate insights in line with post-Fordist ideals of speed and instantaneity. First, Post-it notes enable innovators to produce pseudodata and to decouple data from the market under the guise of its reflection. In the course of the innovation process, innovators represent data about con- The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 17 sumers 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, that is, signs that point to a wide spectrum of potential objects for those who are supposed to interpret them. Such ambiguity and decontextualization are one condition of possibility for the faster production of ideas for new products, because context is weight. 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 pseudodata on conventional visual templates of what a valid insight should look like. Such templates might include a two-by-two matrix or a Venn diagram. When innovators arrange and combine Post-it notes with one another on such templates, the result is a quickly generated “ritual insight,” that is, an insight that receives its validity from the conventional prestige of the ready-made visual template that underlies it. Thus, shaped by a post-Fordist business environment that mandates the quick production of insights, Newfound’s innovation strategy is pervaded by decontextualization, too, even though, as opposed to Brandnew’s strategy, it begins with, and purports to be focused on and empathetic toward, consumers. Against this backdrop, in chapter 5 I address the puzzling fact that although business innovation is often decoupled from the market to which it purportedly refers, 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.” Drawing on fieldwork with both Brandnew and Newfound, I argue 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. I explore this contradiction as it finds expression in innovators’ efforts to mediate their workspace, expert body of knowledge, thought processes, and selves as organizationally creative. In chapter 6 I look at the migration of norms and practices of routinized business innovation outside the business world as a consequence of the rising prestige, visibility, and bulletproof status of those norms and prac- 18 / Introduction tices. I provide an in-depth analysis of “life design,” a set of commercially successful strategies developed by business innovators to help individuals “innovate” their lives and thereby achieve happiness. I argue that the same modern-Romantic notions of the self that provided innovation 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 normative 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. In the conclusion I first tease out a number of theoretical points about routinized business innovation. I then provide a general sociological argument about the function that innovation consultancies perform in the business world, namely, the function 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, I argue 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. “How Did You Get from the Village Vanguard to Wall Street?” The person asking me this question, a chief innovation officer in a Fortune 500 company whom I met in an innovation workshop, was not interested in the actual route one should take if one wanted to go from the Village Vanguard jazz club, located in Manhattan’s West Village, to the city’s financial hub on and around Wall Street in Manhattan’s downtown. A New Yorker for many years, this person could probably generate the shortest and most efficient route in an instant. Rather, he asked me this question after I had described to him my previous research on the rise of academic jazz music The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 19 programs in the United States (Wilf 2014a). His question was a figurative expression of his surprise at the, on the surface, total disconnect between my previous and current research. To him, the short physical distance between those iconic meccas of the jazz and business worlds was in inverse proportion to what he considered to be the long conceptual distance that separated them. And yet, as I argue in the remainder of this chapter, throughout the twentieth century the conceptual distance between the two worlds has gradually become smaller as a result of a series of transformations in the ways in which organizational and management theorists understood and managed the business organization with respect to the role of creative uncertainty. Those transformations culminated in the idea that business organizations should adopt some of the organizational features that are found in the creative arts in general and jazz music in particular if they want to boost their organizational creativity and potential to innovate. These conceptual shifts heralded the transformation of creativity into an alienable means of capitalist production and of business innovation into a key dimension of the business world, thus providing an important contextual and historical backdrop for the story told in this book. Contexts and Histories: From Designing Predictability to Incorporating Uncertainty Joseph Schumpeter has provided an early and highly influential definition of business innovation. Innovation, according to Schumpeter, is the creation of any new economic structure that can be monetized and commercialized. Such structures can include “the introduction of new commodities[,] . . . technological change in the production of commodities already in use, the opening up of new markets or of new sources of supply, Taylorization of work, improved handling of material, the setting up of new business organizations such as department stores—in short, any ‘doing things differently’ in the realm of economic life—all these are instances of what we shall refer to by the term Innovation” (Schumpeter 1939, 84). The notion of innovation as something that is not limited to technological change in a narrow sense has recently found expression in Clayton Christensen’s (1997) highly influential book The Innovator’s Dilemma, in which he clarifies that “technology . . . means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value. . . . This concept of technology therefore extends beyond engineering 20 / Introduction and manufacturing to encompass a range of marketing, investment, and managerial processes. Innovation refers to a change in one of these technologies” (xiii). Throughout the twentieth century (i.e., before the recent exponential rise in the number and visibility of innovation consultants), different kinds of professionals—such as psychologists, sociologists, economists, designers, and organizational theorists—had already developed and disseminated business innovation as a policy-driven concept (Godin 2008, 41; Scott 2003, 38). Two strands of research played a particularly important role in this history: (1) economics and (2) management and organizational research. Economists contributed to the study of innovation via the quantification and measurement of productivity in relation to technological change and its commercialization (Christensen 1997; Godin 2008, 34; Schumpeter 1939). Meanwhile, organization and management theorists worked to identify and design organizational models that could boost productivity. Although organization studies did not exist as an institutionalized scholarly field until the late 1940s, by that time the subject already had important precursory work in the contributions of administrative and management theorists (such as Frederick Taylor), who, from the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century, attempted to formulate managerial principles and rationalize and standardize production. These theorists approached organizations as instruments designed to attain specific and predetermined goals in the most efficient and rational way, which was itself amenable to clear formulation. Taylor’s scientific management of production was “the culmination of a series of developments occurring in the United States between 1880 and 1920 in which engineers took the lead in endeavoring to rationalize industrial organizations” (Scott 2003, 38; see also Shenhav 1999). The image of the organization as a welloiled machine in which different parts work in precise and reliable coordination with one another and nothing is left to chance governed these engineers’ vision. They restructured the tasks workers performed as well as the design of the workspace in an attempt to facilitate efficient and reliable coordination. Ultimately, they also restructured the principles of managerial decision-making. Taylor famously argued that under scientific management arbitrary power, arbitrary dictation, ceases; and every single subject, large and small, becomes the question for scientific investigation, for reduction to law. . . . The man at the head of the business under scientific management is governed by rules and laws which have been developed through hundreds of experiments just as much as the workman is, The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 21 and the standards which have been developed are equitable. (Quoted in Scott 2003, 39) Their goal was to reduce uncertainty and even eliminate it entirely or, if it should arise, to resolve it by means of predetermined, rational procedures. Industrial psychologists influenced subsequent approaches to organizational design. As opposed to their predecessors, they viewed the organization as a much more complex entity. They highlighted the existence of discrepancies between intended organizational goals and the goals organizations actually pursue and between the ideal of formal structure and the reality of informal structure. Key among those industrial psychologists was Elton Mayo, who, through a series of studies, demonstrated that individuals do not always function as atomistic, rational, and economic agents but rather follow a complex set of motivations that involve feelings and sentiments that are based in group solidarity (Scott 2003, 62). Mayo’s findings led to a heightened focus on the capacity of managerial leadership to influence the behavior of subordinates. Managers were encouraged to be more sensitive to workers’ psychological and social needs. This organizational perspective highlighted emotional control, anger management, empathy, and strong interpersonal skills as key managerial resources (Illouz 2008). It subsequently led to managerial notions such as job enrichment, employees’ participation in decision-making, and work satisfaction. In contrast to the rational system approach, this framework acknowledged uncertainty as a possible component of organizational reality. However, similar to the rational system approach, its goal was to train managers and restructure the work environment in such a way that this uncertainty would not arise or, if it should arise, it could immediately be resolved by managers who were equipped with adequate emotional skills. In contrast, the third dominant approach in organization studies, which emerged after World War II, conceptualized the business organization as an entity whose logic encompasses uncertainty and flexibility not as undesirable features but as natural components that provide a crucial resource for the organization’s survival (Scott 2003, 82–101). Inspired by cybernetics and information theory, this approach emphasized the distinction between different systems in terms of their complexity. In less complex systems such as simple machines, the interdependence between parts is rigid, and the behavior of each part is highly constrained. These systems are nonreactive to their environment. They function well in stable environments and are suitable for the completion of predetermined, unchanging tasks according to predetermined schemes of operation. In contrast, in more complex 22 / Introduction systems such as social systems and business organizations, the interdependence between parts is less constrained. These systems are loosely coupled and flexible. Uncertainty is one of their key dimensions. Proponents of this approach viewed uncertainty as an organizational resource rather than an anomaly that must be eliminated as quickly as possible. They argued that complex systems can successfully cope with and even mobilize uncertainty because they are able to process informational input of different kinds— both internally and externally derived—and thus change their means for the attainment of specific goals and the goals themselves according to shifting contextual conditions (cf. Akrich, Callon, and Latour 2002, 189). A significant share of organizational theory subsequently focused on determining proper work flows, control systems, and information-processing templates in relation to human individuals’ ability to manage and capitalize on uncertainty. Karl Weick, one of the key figures in this strand of research, argued that “the basic raw materials on which organizations operate are informational inputs that are ambiguous, uncertain, equivocal”; hence, the goal of organizing should be to establish “a workable level of certainty” in the context of which human individuals could function well (Weick 1969, 40; see also Scott 2003, 98). On the one hand, theorists pointed to the limitations of human individuals as information processors in terms of their “low channel capacity, lack of reliability, and poor computational ability”; on the other hand, they pointed to the advantages of “the human element,” such as “its large memory capacity, its large repertory of responses, its flexibility in relating these responses to information inputs, and its ability to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176; see also Scott 2003, 95). They consequently defined the outstanding task for system designers as “how to create structures that will overcome the limitations and exploit the strengths of each system component, including the individual participants” (Scott 2003, 95). Inspired by nascent psychological research on creativity (Guilford 1950; Osborn 1953; Rossman 1935), they approached “individual participants,” especially their potential to act creatively, as crucial resources that can enable business organizations to function better vis-à-vis the increased uncertainty and volatility that characterize their institutional environment. Significantly, a key strand in this research agenda turned to the creative arts in general, and jazz improvisation in particular, as sources of inspiration for the design of organizational structures that could cultivate and tap into employees’ ability to respond flexibly to conflicting and ambiguous information inputs and “to react creatively when the unexpected is encountered” (Haberstroh 1965, 1176). Theorists argued that the jazz template The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 23 could provide inspiration for the design of business organizational structures that were not only flexible enough to cope with unexpected events but also capable of producing unexpected or “virtual” events in the form of novel ideas for new products. These ideas could then be developed into innovations in fields in which to remain stagnant is to perish (Akgun et al. 2007; Dyba 2000; Kamoche and Cunha 2001; Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998). Incorporating Jazz Improvisation At the 1995 Academy of Management National Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, a symposium titled “Jazz as a Metaphor for Organizing in the 21st Century” took place. The symposium consisted of a series of scholarly presentations, “a demonstration and discussion of jazz improvisation by panelists who were professional jazz musicians, followed by a concert and social event during which these musicians regaled the audience with superb jazz” (Meyer, Frost, and Weick 1998, 540). The presentations, together with additional articles on this topic, were eventually published in the top-tier journal Organization Science. The authors explained that the symposium had been organized in response to the significant changes in the nature of the challenges that organizations would have to cope with in the twenty-first century. As one author put it, to come up with organizational models that would be adequate to this changing environment, we need a model of a group of diverse specialists living in a chaotic, turbulent environment; making fast, irreversible decisions; highly interdependent on one another to interpret equivocal information; dedicated to innovation and the creation of novelty. Jazz players do what managers find themselves doing: fabricating and inventing novel responses without a prescripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that their action creates as it unfolds. (Barrett 1998, 605) Elsewhere the same author added The mechanistic, bureaucratic model for organizing—in which people do routine, repetitive tasks, in which rules and procedures are devised to handle contingencies, and in which managers are responsible for planning, monitoring and creating command and control systems to guarantee compliance—is no longer adequate. Managers will face more rather than less interactive complexity and uncertainty. This suggests that jazz improvisation is a useful meta- 24 / Introduction phor for understanding organizations interested in learning and innovation. To be innovative, managers—like jazz musicians—must interpret vague cues, face unstructured tasks, process incomplete knowledge, and yet they must take action anyway. (Barrett 1998, 620; see also Weick 1998) The term jazz music encompasses a wide range of stylistic genres and is thus a fuzzy category with porous boundaries. Almost all of the organizational theorists who turned to jazz in search of organizational models focused on straight-ahead jazz, in which a group of musicians improvise on a given (“standard”) tune that consists of a melody and a basic harmonic sequence (a string of chords). Players improvise on these minimal structures by using a stock of conventional building blocks such as short phrases and modes of articulation, which they combine in inventive ways and in response to the real-time contribution of their bandmates. The real-time, improvised nature of this art form means that it is inherently an emergent phenomenon; that is, it results in new meaningful structures that to a great extent cannot be anticipated in advance. Although it is not creation ex nihilo because mature improvisers must master different stylistic conventions and have a thorough knowledge of the canon, the actual outcome of group improvisation remains uncertain and unpredictable. Its creativity resides precisely in these features.6 Organizational theorists who turned to the jazz metaphor usually relied on ethnographies of jazz improvisation or their own experience as semiprofessional jazz musicians to emphasize a number of jazz’s features that are related to the uncertainty that pervades it and that is constitutive of jazz’s very creativity.7 For example, Barrett (1998, 609–12) enumerates a number of features of jazz improvisation that are directly related to creative uncertainty and follows these with concrete advice on how these features can be used in organizational design. First, Barrett argues that jazz musicians intentionally disrupt their habituated playing patterns and put themselves in unfamiliar musical situations that are likely to produce errors and unexpected outcomes. They keep pushing themselves beyond their own comfort zone and thus ensure that their playing does not become stagnant and predictable. Second, musicians use the unexpected outcomes and errors that result from this emphasis as resources and musical opportunities to redefine the context: something that at one point seems like an error subsequently becomes coherent within this new context. In this way, musicians constantly generate and develop new meaningful structures. Third, musicians use minimal structures of communication and planning, which foster flexibility and indeterminacy. A player has only a tune’s basic harmonic The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 25 structure and melody to improvise on as well as the ongoing contribution of his bandmates. These minimal structures foster uncertainty of information. Fourth, the jazz band is structured around distributed task negotiation and synchronization between bandmates. This means that information constantly flows in all directions rather than hierarchically. With respect to each of these features, Barrett makes concrete suggestions for organizational design whose goal is to infuse the business organization with creativity and to create the organizational conditions of possibility for continued innovation. First, organizational leaders must encourage and require their employees to abandon habituated modes of doing things and instead to take risks. Second, they must change their modes of evaluating their employees by treating the latter’s errors as an inseparable part of learning rather than as punishable events. This recommendation first treats errors as an inevitable outcome of learning and then embraces them as a resource. By creating “organizational climates that value errors as a source of learning . . . organizational leaders can create an aesthetic of imperfection and an aesthetic of forgiveness that construes errors as a source of learning that might open new lines of inquiry” (Barrett 1998, 619).8 Third, organizational leaders must develop the equivalent of minimal structures that will sustain maximum flexibility and maintain ambiguity while providing employees with sufficient orientation. Such equivalent structures might be “credos, stories, myths, visions, slogans, mission statements, trademarks” (612). Fourth, organizational leaders must cultivate a work environment characterized by “distributed, multiple leadership in which people take turns leading various projects as their expertise is needed” (618). These and similar recommendations were the outcome of the paradigmatic shift in organization studies that culminated in the realization that contingency and uncertainty have become part and parcel of the environments within which many organizations must function and that a flexible organizational structure has a better chance of coping with such environments for two reasons. First, a flexible organization can better respond to unexpected events in its external and internal environments. Second, it can generate unexpected events that are essential for innovation. Many programmatic calls for business organizations to adopt organizational models from the jazz world and the creative arts have been motivated by the hope that such models can foster a culture of innovation and new product development. If the jazz band enables musicians to produce unexpected events continuously and then to elaborate some of these events into new meaningful structures, then, it is hoped, an organization that adopts the jazz band’s organizational model might be able to produce unexpected ideas continu- 26 / Introduction ously and then develop them into viable innovations in business sectors and niches in which to remain stagnant is to perish. It is for this reason that organizational models inspired by jazz improvisation have been discussed predominantly in the context of “new product development in turbulent environments” (Akgun et al. 2007; Moorman and Miner 1998), “product innovation” (Kamoche and Cunha 2001), and the functioning of small software organizations (Dyba 2000) rather than in the context of organizational change in general (Mantere, Sillince, and Hamalainen 2007). The distinction anthropologists have made between “possible uncertainty” and “potential uncertainty” can clarify the appeal of this organizational strategy. Whereas “possible uncertainty . . . is dependent on past knowledge, calculation, and evaluation (the chances of a particular risk being realized),” “potential uncertainty, by contrast, does not derive from the question of whether one future possibility or another will be realized (as in the case of possible uncertainty) but from a virtual domain with the capacity to generate a broad variety of actualizations” (Samimian-Darash 2013, 4, emphasis added). The “actualizations” that this “virtual domain” can generate may have never taken place before and hence are not known and cannot be known in advance. Creativity in jazz is based in “potential uncertainty.” Organizational theorists found inspiration in the idea that the jazz band functions as a “virtual domain” in which musicians can generate a wide variety of new and hitherto unthought-of musical events and then develop them into new structures whose full meaning becomes apparent only retrospectively because of their emergent nature: The improviser can begin by playing a virtual random series of notes, with little or no intention as how it will unfold. These notes become the material to be shaped and worked out, like pieces of a puzzle. The improviser begins to enter into a dialogue with her material: prior selections begin to fashion subsequent ones as these are aligned and reframed in relation to prior patterns. (Barrett 1998, 615, emphasis added) Organizational theorists found jazz’s “virtual domain” appealing in light of their belief that in turbulent environments that require organizations to incessantly develop new products, services, and structures, organizational structures that engage with uncertainty only in the form of calculating the chances of the realization of a particular possibility that is already formulated and imagined in advance (“possible uncertainty”) might not be very useful. Although managers certainly make conjectures about what might be “the next big thing” and are engaged in calculating the probability that this The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation / 27 or that next “big thing” will actually materialize, to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, their organizations must also develop structures that can constantly generate new events that were not hitherto thought of and allow for their development into new products.9 Some of the innovators I worked with specifically referred to the stage in the innovation process in which ideas for new products and services are generated as “the virtual situation,” thus pointing at the fact that “potential uncertainty” rather than “possible uncertainty” was the form of uncertainty to which they oriented their professional practice. The organizational need to foster this specific configuration of creative uncertainty and virtuality that will give rise to hitherto unimagined events explains why many organizational theorists have turned to the creative arts in general in search of new organizational models. Modern Western art is based in the Romantic idea of the creative, as opposed to the imitative, imagination (Abrams 1971). Whereas the imitative form of imagination entails the representation of existing worlds, the creative form of imagination entails the creation of new, hitherto unimagined worlds. I will discuss these and related modern-Romantic normative ideals of creativity in detail in subsequent chapters, for they provided some of the cultural conditions of possibility for the innovation strategies that the innovators I worked with developed. The intimate historical and cultural links between routinized business innovation and normative ideals and practices of creative agency have contributed to making business innovation a powerful cultural trope that has captured the imagination of business executives and the wider public. At the same time, these links have also produced significant complications for innovation consultants who have to convince their potential clients that they have developed the means to routinize creativity and transform it from a mercurial human faculty, as it has for long been understood in the modern Western popular imagination, into a reliable and stable organizational source of ideas for new products and services. Before unpacking these contradictions, however, it is first necessary to have a better sense of what routinized business innovation strategies actually look like and what their added value for business organizations might be.