Appetite for Innovation: Creativity and Change at elBulli

By M. Pilar Opazo

The name elBulli is synonymous with creativity and innovation. Located in Catalonia, Spain, the three-star Michelin restaurant led the world to molecular” or techno-emotional” cooking and made fantastic creations, such as pine-nut marshmallows, rose-scented mozzarella, liquid olives, and melon caviar, into a sensational reality. People traveled from all over the worldif they could secure a coveted reservation during its six months of operationto experience the wonder that chef Ferran Adrià and his team concocted in their test kitchen, never offering the same dish twice. Yet elBulli’s business model proved unsustainable. The restaurant converted to a foundation in 2011, and is working hard on its next revolution. Will elBulli continue to innovate? What must an organization do to create something truly new?

Appetite for Innovation is an organizational analysis of elBulli and the nature of innovation. M. Pilar Opazo was with elBulli's inner circle as the restaurant transitioned from a for-profit business to its new organizational model. She compares this moment to the culture of change that first made elBulli famous, and she describes the novel forms of communication, idea mobilization, and embeddedness that continue to encourage the staff to focus and invent as a whole. She concludes that the successful strategies employed by elBulli are similar to those required for innovative achievements in art, music, business, and technology, proving the model’s value across organizations and industries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jul 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541633

Book preview

Appetite for Innovation

Appetite for Innovation

Creativity and Change at elBulli

M. Pilar Opazo

Columbia University Press / New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York   Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54163-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Opazo, M. Pilar (Maria Pilar), author.

Title: Appetite for innovation : creativity and change at elBulli / M. Pilar Opazo.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016006100 | ISBN 9780231176781 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: elBulli (Restaurant)—History. | Business incubators. | Organizational change. | Creative destruction.

Classification: LCC TX945.5.E44 O63 2016 | DDC 647.95068—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016006100

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos

To Jose and Amanda

…and the little one on his way

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1    Context and Vision

2    From Chaos to Order: elBulli’s System of Continuous Innovation

3    Diffusion and Institutionalization of Innovation

4    The Bittersweet Taste of Relentless Innovation

5    Cooking Up a New Organization

Conclusion

Notes

References

Appendix

Index

Acknowledgments

Just as mobilizing newness is not a solitary enterprise, the development of this book was the result of a series of efforts and contributions of many people who helped me move forward. Without their support and advice, this book would simply not have been possible.

My mentors at Columbia University provided great inspiration, encouragement, and advice that shaped my research throughout. I am immensely grateful to my advisor, Peter Bearman, for his great generosity, sharp ideas, and careful guidance. People who visited me at my office were surprised to see three Post-its that I had next to my computer, and which guided my writing: Have fun, Pick up flowers, Think crazy and wild! Three comments that, in fact, summarized Peter’s latest feedback. My conversations with him offered both intellectual stimulation and happiness throughout the entire process of developing this book.

My mentor Diane Vaughan introduced me to the richness of ethnographic work; she encouraged my care for details and the depth of my theoretical analyses. I am deeply indebted to her for her insightful and constructive comments at each step of this process, and for her keen (and often contagious) sense of humor. I am also very thankful to Priscilla Ferguson for her enthusiasm in my project from the very start. Her great knowledge of the sociology of gastronomy and cultural studies was very important in shaping this book. The many conversations that I had with Diane and Priscilla over good food or coffee will become food rituals by the time this manuscript is published.

I am also very grateful to David Stark for introducing me to the fascinating world of innovation and its connection with organizing and organizations. Conversations at his Center for Organizational Innovation (COI) at Columbia University have played an important role in my research since its very early stages. Finally, the creative chaos that emerged from my interactions with Harrison White was highly influential in my work. I hope that this book can reflect, at least in part, the valuable advice that I obtained from each one of them and the privilege of having them as my mentors.

In developing this book, I was fortunate to work closely with Darío Rodríguez and Ramón Sangüesa. Ever since I was an undergraduate student, Darío has not only read everything that I have written (including quite unpolished versions of this book), he has also fostered my sociological imagination in ways that I would never have expected. I am very proud to say that he continues to be my dear friend and mentor to this day. Ramón joined me in many of the adventures involved in this research and was a constant source of positive energy behind my work. I am very thankful for the opportunities he has given me and for all the doors that he has helped me open.

This research was supported by a Fulbright grant and by a grant from the Technical University of Catalonia (#C08505) awarded by Telefónica Digital. I am deeply indebted to Pablo Rodríguez for his constant support and relevant comments at various stages of this investigation, and also to Oriol Lloret, María José Tomé, and Lars Stalling for their continuous encouragement and insightful suggestions. Telefónica Digital provided me with a stimulating space to write while I was in Barcelona and to present my ideas when they were still under development. I am extremely grateful for this.

In the final stages of my project, I had the opportunity to be part of the Mellon Fellowship at the Interdisciplinary Center of Innovative Theory and Empirics (INCITE), Columbia University. I also helped form and joined the Initiative for the Study and Practice of Organized Creativity and Culture (ISPOCC) at the Columbia Business School. The lively dialogues that I shared with these groups greatly inspired this book. In this respect, I am particularly thankful to William McAllister and Damon Phillips for their kind mentorship and constant support.

Friends and colleagues made this book a better one by providing substantive intellectual and practical support. Special thanks to Constanza Miranda for writing with me and for pushing me to search for the unknown; to Consuelo del Canto and Diana del Olmo for accompanying me at all stages; and to Rosemary McGunnigle-Gonzales for the countless phone conversations that we had about my work. Many thanks to Fabien Accominotti for sharing his great knowledge of the art worlds with me and for always being open to discuss new ideas, even if they were largely unrelated to his work. Thanks to Ifeoma Ajunwa, Juan and Jean Capello, Alfonso Cruz, Daniel Fridman, Carmen Gloria Larenas, Federico Leighton, Anna Mitschele, Kristin Murphy, Olivia Nicole, Trinidad Vidal, and Anna Zamora for their friendship and advice at various stages of this book. My foodie friends, Michael Nixon and Naja Stamer, read earlier drafts of the chapters and gave me comments when I much needed them. Thanks to Adriana Freitas for our long walks in Barcelona, and to Laia Sanchis for offering me a wonderful place to stay. The help of Katie Kashkett and Deanna Villanueva significantly improved this book by incorporating their editorial skills into this project, for which I am extremely grateful. Special thanks to Patricia Yagüe for making this a fun project by introducing her design skills into it, and for stimulating many creative sparks that are part of this book. Finally, my conversations with Dora Arenas during my coffee breaks provided much inspiration and joy to my otherwise lonely days of writing.

I am enormously grateful to Ferran Adrià and the elBulli team, and to each one of my respondents for being generous and curious enough to contribute to my research and, ultimately, to make it happen. My gratitude also goes to two anonymous reviewers at Columbia University Press for their insightful readings of an earlier manuscript and for their helpful and inspiring comments and criticisms.

Last but not least, I want to thank my family, and the love of my life, Jose. My dad, Eduardo Opazo, was the first to encourage me to contact elBulli, and he later read successive drafts that kept pushing me forward. My mother, Maite Bretón, was always there for me to talk about my work, and in doing so, she brightened (and continues to brighten) each one of my days. My sisters Magdalena and Maite greatly contributed to this book by engaging in active discussions about my ideas while they were still being cooked. My husband, Jose, has been my companion in every step of this process and my greatest source of inspiration and love. Jose, tú eres el motor de mis sueños. I dedicate this book to him and to our daughter, Amanda, who recently arrived to transform our lives when we thought that things could not get any better.

Introduction

The backstage view of one of the world’s most intriguing restaurants looked like perfectly organized chaos. In elBulli’s kitchen, more than forty cooks coordinated in almost seamless ways to prepare a menu of thirty to forty courses that would be served that night, one of the last nights of the elBulli restaurant’s existence. On one side of the large kitchen, two head chefs were working on something that looked like a big balloon covered by a thin, white membrane. And, on the other side, an apprentice made small spheres and later dropped them with a spoon in a yellowish liquid. At the kitchen’s center was Ferran Adrià, elBulli’s chef and co-owner. Rather than supervising the cooking process, however, Adrià was insistently making notes and diagrams in several documents that were spread out on the bar and on a wooden table next to the kitchen. Supposedly, this is also where Adrià sat at least twice a week to test the consistency of elBulli’s menu. By the time of my visit, Adrià had already announced the unusual decision to close his successful restaurant to build a new research center for innovation under the name of elBulli Foundation.

As I watched how this scene unfolded, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. While a diner would probably have remarked on the meticulous preparation involved in each of elBulli’s magical recipes, from a sociological perspective, I was most intrigued by those seemingly insignificant yet systematic actions that make an organization’s production of innovation possible. I knew that in the last decades, elBulli and Adrià had not only created new food preparations, they had also become a key driving force behind the establishment of a new movement in the gastronomic field,¹ often interchangeably called molecular, techno-emotional, or experimental cuisine by the mass media. Years earlier, along with Chefs Heston Blumenthal from Fat Duck, Thomas Keller from French Laundry and Per Se, and Harold McGee, who has written seminal books on the topic of science and cooking, Adrià had published a statement in the newspaper, The Guardian, advancing the principles of a new cookery. This approach, he announced, proposed culinary innovation in the form of new techniques, equipment, and new information in general, while building on the conventional knowledge of gastronomy.² By the time of my visit to the elBulli restaurant, Adrià and elBulli’s presence was so significant in the gastronomic landscape that many chefs who were at the top of the culinary rankings had been trained in elBulli’s kitchen.

Further, by then anyone familiar with the latest trends in fine dining would know that, from 1997 to 2011, the elBulli restaurant had received the coveted recognition of three Michelin stars; and it had been declared the Best Restaurant in the World for an unprecedented five times by Restaurant Magazine, another influential culinary ranking. It was also common knowledge that interested diners would wait for years to be able to eat at elBulli. Roughly two million people wrote an e-mail every November to ask for a reservation at the restaurant, but only 8,000 diners got to eat there every season.³ The level of exclusivity at this restaurant seemed simply impossible in practice.

In some way, I had experienced this extreme exclusivity myself. In 2007, after six years of waiting, my parents received an e-mail offering them the opportunity to dine at this acclaimed restaurant. Months in advance, they had planned their vacation so as to drive from Madrid, where they lived at that time, all the way up to Cala Montjoi, the natural reserve in the province of Girona, Catalonia, where the elBulli restaurant is located. While in my home country, Chile, I remember receiving pictures of them sitting at one of the tables in the restaurant’s terrace, just a few steps above the beach, ready to start their meals. Back then, the food being served looked indeed quite intriguing, at least to the eyes of an outsider. As my mother said when she described one of the dishes that she had that night: It was like an edible gold brooch…but one that exploded in your mouth while you were eating it! Despite the restaurant’s beautiful location and how stimulating the food was purported to be, back then I could not stop wondering how it was possible for reservations at a restaurant to be in such high demand, or for that matter, why potential clients would wait for years to be chosen to dine there. What was it about this restaurant elBulli? What was its secret?

By the time of the restaurant’s closure in 2011, it had also become unbelievably competitive for culinary professionals to work at elBulli as unpaid interns or apprentices. Every year 3,000 highly trained professionals from all over the world applied for a slot as a stagiaire, but only thirty or so were accepted. Part of the difficulty of getting a position at elBulli derived from the fact that the restaurant was open only six months a year, in order to dedicate the other six months to experimentation and creativity. Allegedly, this closing period enabled the restaurant to fully renovate its menu each year, presenting ever more exotic and ingenious creations to customers season after season. As a result, just as interested guests could not predict whether they would be chosen to dine at the elBulli restaurant, they were also not permitted to select what they wanted to eat once they had arrived there.

The mystical aura around elBulli was continuously reinforced by accounts of the restaurant’s leader, Ferran Adrià. For over a decade, the mass media has portrayed him as a genius, a visionary, and a sorcerer of cuisine. And, beyond cuisine, Adrià has been frequently compared to icons of creativity such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. With no English skills, Adrià has traveled all over the world giving talks about innovation and creativity; and without holding a college degree, he had stepped into the academic world as the keynote speaker of a course being taught at Harvard University called Science and Cooking. After the first iteration of the course in 2010, the number of students who wanted to enroll in the class was so great that a lottery had to be designed to determine who would get to participate. Thus, just as at the elBulli restaurant, students were not able to predict whether they would be chosen to be part of the class or whether they would have to try their luck during a subsequent year.

Months prior to my visit to elBulli in 2011, Adrià had announced the transformation of his mysterious restaurant into a think tank of creativity, which would reopen in 2015.⁴ Yet, when reading about elBulli’s reinvention from my office at Columbia University, I had realized that there was something puzzling about this new organization too. Despite my efforts, I hadn’t been able to understand what the elBulli Foundation was going to be about—an interesting fact in itself. And when searching the Internet, I had come across the vast amount of historical records and detailed accounts of elBulli’s creations, which, for the most part, were made available by the organization itself. In fact, I would later recognize these records when observing Adrià’s preparation of one of his restaurant’s final meals.

Curious about all this and with the intuition that there was much to be learned from the workings of elBulli from a sociological and organizational perspective, I prepared a two-page document describing my interest in conducting research at elBulli. I sent it that same week to the elBulli team. To my surprise, I seemed to be among the lucky ones, because a few days later I received a reply that said something like this: Thanks so much for your e-mail on Ferran [Adrià’s] behalf. We find your project interesting and we would like to know what we can do to help.

In my first encounters with Adrià and his team, I tried to explain to them my interest in studying elBulli as an organization whose experience could inform practices undertaken by other organizations concerned with the production of innovation. I would soon find out that the moment I had chosen to conduct my research was particularly fortuitous, given that my fieldwork was going to take place precisely when the organization was undergoing its most radical transformation and elBulli’s members, especially Adrià, were themselves questioning and evaluating the structures that sustained the organization’s operation.

Later, when I started collecting narratives from professionals in the gastronomic field both connected and unconnected to elBulli, I noticed that, like the mass media, many of them used expressions such as genius, visionary, or God-like to describe Adrià’s qualities. Many of my interviewees, for instance, intimated that they believed Adrià was able to see more than others can see and attested to this by pointing out his magical or extraordinary capacities to create. As a sociologist, however, I was not interested in examining the psychological features of Adrià’s personality, or in writing a biography that detailed his personal life (which is in fact already available for interested readers). Instead, my goal was to consider elBulli as a case that can expand our knowledge of how innovation can be enacted by an organization and, in so doing, provoke changes in the larger system of which it is part. Accordingly, Adrià’s personal beliefs or motivations were interesting to me only as long as they unveiled aspects of the role played by a charismatic leader in sustaining innovation over time.

ElBulli was able to mobilize changes in the culinary field for over two decades, as we will see—changes that gradually percolated into other fields such as design, science, and technology. New culinary techniques and concepts developed by elBulli such as foams, frozen airs, spherifications, and deconstruction increasingly made their way into haute cuisine kitchens around the world. And, by the time the restaurant closed, elBulli had already entered people’s homes by marketing molecular gastronomy kits that offered the opportunity to introduce elements of elBulli’s cuisine into everyday meals. In addition to cooking techniques, organizational practices pioneered by elBulli had also spread into the high-end restaurant sector. Several recognized avant garde restaurants around the globe, for example, now have test kitchens or cuisine laboratories of their own, and also close for a definite period of time so as to fully dedicate their staff’s energy to creativity.

How was it possible for a restaurant in the middle of nowhere to reach and have an impact upon the world that resided outside it? How did a self-taught cook with no English skills come to be recognized as an international icon of creativity and innovation? In some way, elBulli has managed to stay creative for several years and continued to captivate the public’s attention during its periods of intermission. This book analyzes the process through which this occurred, not only by illuminating the underlying factors that explain Adrià’s visionary capacities but also, and most importantly, by examining the processes and dynamics that enable an organization to produce systematic and radical innovation.

My investigation will make clear that while many good ideas may emerge from random creative sparks or from an individual’s talent, the relentless production of innovation cannot be explained only by this. The research will show that innovation that is able to enact changes in a field is rather the result of concrete and collective practices that make it possible for new knowledge to be understood, recognized, and legitimized by the public. The experience of elBulli will illustrate that institutionalizing innovation involves the construction of an organizing structure that is able to win the support of a coherent group of people that helps to disseminate and maintain a new cause.

To understand the processes behind elBulli’s production of innovation, I examined the organization’s history and the different factors, both internal and external to the organization, that enabled it to become an avant garde restaurant, and that allowed Adrià to be recognized as a worldwide icon of innovation. Tracing the organization’s past, as we shall see, was critical in understanding the organization’s present, as it offered possibilities to identify the patterns that explain elBulli’s growing trajectory. Moreover, instead of limiting my analysis to the internal workings of elBulli, I examined the organization’s interaction with the wider context of its operation, what organizational scholars refer to as the institutional environment. This involved including the views of people who had directly witnessed the inner workings of elBulli and, therefore, could provide me with insights regarding what was distinctive about the organization. It also required the inclusion of the perceptions of people who were not connected to elBulli and, hence, who could tell me about how the organization was able to reach and influence outsiders.

Given that the culinary field is multidisciplinary, I gathered narratives from a wide variety of participants in the contemporary gastronomic industry in two different yet interconnected sites: Spain and the United States, mainly Barcelona and New York, cities considered culinary hubs. My interviewees included current and former members of elBulli, elBulli purveyors and collaborators, and former elBulli apprentices, most of whom were chefs at renowned restaurants at the time of my interviews. I also collected narratives of elBulli’s outsiders including gastronomic critics, chefs, faculty members of culinary institutes, and food scholars. During my fieldwork, furthermore, I attended gastronomic conferences and events advertised as platforms organized for chefs and by chefs, and had exclusive access to the elBulli workshop and to original documentation while the new foundation was being constructed. For a detailed account of the data collected and the subjects who participated in the study, please refer to the Appendix.

In this book, readers will find that while words like visionary or sorcerer have been repeatedly used to describe the personality of elBulli’s leader, the organization’s methods for developing innovation are far from incidental. Rather, plenty of purposeful action is involved in making innovations effective within the organization and recognized by those outside it. As is the case with every organization, at elBulli, specific practices were mobilized on the ground in order to reach the world outside its boundaries and, thereby, to consolidate its reputation within its field.

Ultimately, this book represents a journey into a puzzling organizational model that pushes itself to its limits. Readers will notice that, unlike other organizations engaged in the development of innovation, elBulli is not concerned with the production of final products or services, but with encouraging permanent processes of discovery. For this reason, rather than reproducing successes, elBulli chooses to continue to innovate. To do this, the organization built a dynamic structure to sustain innovation over time. This study offers a close look into the vision of this innovative organization, and the social arrangements that were generated to make this vision effective in reality. It explains the internal and external practices that were at play in the workings of elBulli, and that eventually mobilized the entire reinvention of the organization itself.

My work expands on existing accounts written about elBulli and Adrià in a number of ways. First, it constitutes an extensive analysis that goes beyond the organization’s limits (and of its leader’s individual capacities) to understand its functioning. It also expands sociological studies of haute cuisine by providing a new window of observation into the development of innovation in the gastronomic field, from the late twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is important, given that the culinary landscape has undergone significant changes in the last few decades. Among these is a new role for chefs in society, a phenomenon usually called celebrity chefs—a category in which Adrià is considered an iconic figure. Moreover, nowadays recipes and culinary experiences at restaurants are widely circulated throughout the Web by food professionals, food bloggers, and food aficionados alike. Cuisine, thus, has become a topic prevalent in society, manifested in the growing number of TV shows related to food and the increasing number of books and magazines that focus on cooking from different perspectives. By providing an in-depth analysis of one iconic organization in the contemporary culinary landscape, this book offers a peek into the inner world of chefs, and thereby into some of the dynamics that encouraged the gastronomic revolution that has taken place over the last two decades.

Finally, this investigation proposes a new way to think about innovation that extends beyond the production of new ultimate products. Too often, innovation is examined by looking at an organization’s final outcomes (such as patents) and by analyzing the conditions that lead to those outcomes. The major concern of this book, instead, is to show how innovation can be systematically mobilized in and by organizing systems. In doing so, it attempts to unveil the concrete practices that enable new ideas to have a sustained impact upon a wider population.

The structure that I chose to organize the book reflects the different processes involved in the enactment of radical innovation, from envisioning and implementing, to socializing and legitimating. Chapter 1 sets the groundwork for understanding the origins of elBulli’s new ideas, and retraces the historical development of the organization prior to starting to propose new ways of doing things in cuisine. Chapter 2 examines the inner functioning of the organization by looking at how the vision of one individual was adopted by a group of creators who were all working toward a common goal. It also examines how teams, time, and space were managed at elBulli, and how the crafting of a language, accompanied by systematic documentation, became a central mechanism for sustaining innovation within the organization.

Chapter 3 deals with the social dynamics that made it possible for elBulli’s new cuisine to be understood and recognized by the gastronomic community. It describes the vehicles that were generated by the organization to stabilize a new basis of knowledge within its field. Chapter 4 examines the unintended consequences of the relentless production of innovation, its connection to the closure of the elBulli restaurant, and the need for the organization’s reinvention.

Finally, Chapter 5 engages with the ongoing construction of elBulli’s new organization, the elBulli Foundation. The transformation of the restaurant is used here as an opportunity to test and refine the practices found to explain the organization’s innovative capacity—from making new recipes, to making new organizational structures to innovate, to making an entirely new organization. The chapter also offers readers the opportunity to explore the uncertainty surrounding elBulli’s new project, and the limits of an organization’s search for radical innovation and endless reinvention.

In analyzing the case of elBulli as one that can expand our understanding of how innovation works, this book addresses a number of themes that are central to sociology and to the study of organizations in general. On the one hand, it offers a close look into the phenomenon of charisma by examining the organized efforts made to sustain an organization and its leader’s charismatic authority. On the other hand, from a methodological standpoint, my investigation can be used as a resource for the study of other extraordinary populations. Sociologists tend to be experts in studying the outcasts or the socially marginalized, but not to interview and study those who are recognized as extraordinary creative minds. Readers who have conducted fieldwork might anticipate that this is not at all an easy task. In my case, my bilingualism was an essential resource that helped me deal with this type of personality, which is often complex and unpredictable, and also to eliminate the mystery around Adrià and his team. On repeated occasions, I found myself speaking quickly and assertively, as I saw them do in their interactions, so as to get my ideas and questions across. Yet it was only when I started to act as a mirror for them (that is, to develop diagrams and maps similar to the ones they did to show how I saw their work) that they started to see me as a different kind of expert and, accordingly, to treat me as an equal and sometimes even as a confidant.

While my research is valuable in the ways indicated above, it also has a number of limitations that are important to outline. First, as a case study, it does not include any exhaustive cross-case comparisons, but only considers the experience of other organizations (such as restaurants) to unveil the specificity of the case under study. Nevertheless, there are numerous universes that, like elBulli, have been a central force in driving innovation within the gastronomic field and in other fields, examination of which would shed light on the findings obtained from this study. Second, given that my goal was to understand how elBulli’s creations came to be recognized as innovations, the focus of my research is on success. I do hope, however, that my examination of the organization’s growth shows that favorable outcomes are neither necessary nor impossible for an organization’s development. Third, consistent with the ethnographic nature of my research, the analysis is restricted to the sites selected for the study and does not attempt to be representative of a general population. Thus, this book’s objective is not to provide definite answers that can be invariably applied to diverse contexts, but simply to offer insights for future studies and applications of innovation.

One final aspect that shaped this book and that I find important to share is that, during the course of my research, I was in constant interaction with different types of audiences: from academics to business professionals to chefs. While having these different audiences introduced additional complexity to the project, it also provided diverse and insightful feedback that greatly influenced this work. The writing style that I use is a reflection of this process. In my work, I try to avoid jargon as much as possible so as to make my analysis accessible to a wider readership, including people who are familiar with elBulli’s story and the maneuverings of the gastronomic field and those who are not, as well as people who are acquainted with sociological theories and empirical approximations and those who aren’t. In keeping with this goal, I use copious quotations, pictures, and diagrams in the hope that they will better convey the richness of the world that I encountered while doing fieldwork. I also present a recipe of elBulli at the opening of each chapter. These recipes retrace the historical development of the organization, and illustrate central arguments made throughout the book. In the end, I hope my study will provide readers with an opportunity to enter the workings of a mysterious organization, and to realize that if one looks closely enough, things might not seem that mysterious after all.

0.1 and 0.2 (top) Ferran Adrià at his restaurant, and (bottom) elBulli’s terrace during the restaurant’s last week of operation; Cala Montjoi, Roses, Catalonia, Spain.

A Brief Note on the Meaning of Innovation

Innovation has become a fashionable term, widely used across disciplines and industries. Yet the widespread use of the term has rendered its meaning largely ambiguous. As a result, the term innovation is often used interchangeably with similar-sounding concepts such as change, entrepreneurship, or creativity. While there is a thin line that distinguishes all these terms, it is important to clarify it for the purposes of this investigation.⁵

Innovation is not equivalent to change; innovation corresponds to the capacity to drive change. Any living system, an individual or an organization, is in