Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

By Eitan Y. Wilf

Business consultants everywhere preach the benefits of innovation—and promise to help businesses reap them. A trendy industry, this type of consulting generates courses, workshops, books, and conferences that all claim to hold the secrets of success. But what promises does the notion of innovation entail? What is it about the ideology and practice of business innovation that has made these firms so successful at selling their services to everyone from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies? And most important, what does business innovation actually mean for work and our economy today?
 
In Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf seeks to answer these questions by returning to the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual innovation. Wilf focuses a keen eye on how our obsession with ceaseless innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society. Based on ethnographic work with innovation consultants in the United States, he reveals, among other surprises, how routine the culture of innovation actually is. Procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way, and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely new thinking, but to produce predictable signs of continual change. A masterful look at the contradictions of our capitalist age, Creativity on Demand is a model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Feb 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9780226607023

Eitan Y. Wilf

Eitan Y. Wilf is an associate professor of anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He studies the institutional transformations of creativity in the United States.

Book preview

Creativity on Demand

Creativity on Demand

The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

EITAN Y. WILF

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2019 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2019

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60683-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60697-2 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-60702-3 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226607023.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilf, Eitan Y., author.

Title: Creativity on demand : the dilemmas of innovation in an accelerated age / Eitan Y. Wilf.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018025832 | ISBN 9780226606835 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226606972 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226607023 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Creative ability in business. | Corporate culture. | Organizational behavior. | Business anthropology. | Industrial management.

Classification: LCC HD53 .W56 2019 | DDC 658.4/063—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025832

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Old La Honda, Page Mill, Tunitas Creek, Kings Mountain, and Alpine Roads

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION  /  The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation

ONE  /  Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan: Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With

TWO  /  Putting This Mess into a Structure: Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions

THREE  /  Listening to the Voice of the Product: Human Creativity Displaced

FOUR  /  The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation

FIVE  /  Clutter: Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation

SIX  /  Life Design: The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation

CONCLUSION  /  Institutional Myths of Innovation

Notes

List of References

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to express my deepest thanks to my interlocutors in the field of business innovation who let me into their world and were generous with their time. They were willing to answer my questions regardless of how far removed from their practice these questions were. I hope those of them who end up reading this book will recognize themselves in it, especially the complex, multidetermined, and often contradictory subject positions they occupy.

This book took shape during the 2016–2017 academic year when I was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Science at Stanford University (CASBS). This place proved to be ideal not only because of its location at the center of Silicon Valley, the origin site of many of the discourses and practices that this book analyzes, but also because of the nurturing environment it provided me. This environment consisted of CASBS’s amazing natural setting, wonderful staff, and other fellows who spent the academic year with me. Among the latter with whom I had countless enriching conversations, I would like to thank Steven Feld, Miyako Inoue, Zephyr Frank, Cate Zaloom, Tara Behrend, Eric Klinenberg, and Margaret Levi. Special thanks are due to Don Brenneis—a longtime interlocutor—for making Palo Alto a warm and welcoming place.

I am grateful to the people who engaged with my research when I presented it in the departments of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Diego; Yale University; the University of Amsterdam; the University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University; the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of St. Andrews; the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Free University in Berlin; and at the annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association and the Society for the Social Studies of Science. I especially want to acknowledge the helpful feedback given in these venues by Niko Besnier, Don Brenneis, Ilana Gershon, John Haviland, Mette High, Paul Kockelman, Paul Manning, Keith Murphy, Katharina Schramm, Lucy Suchman, Greg Urban, and Kathryn Woolard.

Priya Nelson, my editor at the University of Chicago Press, should be thanked for supporting this project and for giving me invaluable stylistic advice that helped breathe life into an initial version of the manuscript that badly needed it. A number of anonymous reviewers for the press provided crucial feedback that helped significantly improve this book.

Related versions of certain portions of this work have been published elsewhere as follows: portions of chapter 1 appeared in Routinized Business Innovation: An Undertheorized Engine of Cultural Evolution, American Anthropologist 117, no. 4 (2015): 679–92; portions of chapter 2 were first published in Ritual Semiosis in the Business Corporation: Recruitment to Routinized Innovation, Signs and Society 3, no. S1 (2015): S13–S40; portions of chapter 4 and the conclusion first appeared in The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation through One of Its Key Semiotic Technologies, Current Anthropology 57, no. 6 (2016): 732–60; and portions of the introduction were published in The ‘Cool’ Organization Man: Incorporating Uncertainty from Jazz Music into the Business World, in Modes of Uncertainty: Anthropological Cases, ed. Limor Samimian-Darash and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 29–45. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers involved in the production of these publications for their feedback on the arguments developed therein.

The research at the center of this book would not have been possible had it not been for the financial support given to me in the form of a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant from the European Research Council, an Individual Research Grant from the Israel Science Foundation, and a Research Grant from the Shane Center at the Hebrew University.

Lastly, I thank Anneke Beerkens for sharing with me her passion for creativity and for modeling it in her thoughts and existence.

INTRODUCTION

The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation

The Innovator’s Dilemma

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 two-hour 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-to-ceiling 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.’ 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 in-depth knowledge of such context-specific domains because innovation’s 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 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-to-date 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. Organizations 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; Lévi-Strauss 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?

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 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 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 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 innovation process. Ideas for new products shape, and are shaped by, innovators’ ideas about consumers. Future products and unmet consumer needs thus come