Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age
240
Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age
240eBook
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226607023 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/04/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan
Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With
A Cheeseburger Soaked in Water
In March, 2013, I participated in a three-day innovation workshop organized by Brandnew in a hotel in downtown Manhattan. For a long time I could not bring myself to book a flight from Tel Aviv to New York to attend Brandnew's workshops given the long time that I would have to spend on airplanes, let alone the jet lag that would await me. However, after receiving another email from Brandnew announcing one of their approaching workshops, I decided to book a flight, hoping that my decision would not result in a major waste of time and resources. And so it happened that on a cold and bright early morning I left my hotel in downtown Manhattan in a foggy cognitive state, having barely slept the previous night. After a short walk, I entered another hotel and, after losing my way in a maze of corridors, finally arrived at a conference hall where I found most of the workshop participants — twenty-four business people, some of whom were chief innovation officers in Fortune 500 companies — already seated at the tables that were arranged in a semicircle facing the four facilitators.
After all the participants had arrived, the facilitators asked them to briefly present their names, the companies they worked for, and their roles. Following this presentation, the facilitators devoted the next few sessions to explaining the origins and principles of Brandnew's signature innovation strategy in very broad brushstrokes that did not reveal any concrete applicable tools. During the short breaks between those sessions, some of the participants muttered to one another that they were losing their patience. They wanted to see the tangible results that they would be able to produce by means of whatever it was that Brandnew had to offer. Perhaps sensing this general mood, Tom, a facilitator in his early forties, opened the last session of the first day by announcing, to everyone's relief: "And now we will get our hands dirty. Find a partner and within thirty seconds find a product that your company does not make but which you like, and make sure to discuss what you like about it. It should cost less than fifty dollars." The participants grouped themselves in pairs and followed Tom's instructions. My partner was Angela, a woman in her early fifties who was a chief innovation officer in a major pharmaceutical company. Angela immediately suggested a cheeseburger as our product. She did not tell me what she liked about it, perhaps because she thought it was self-evident.
Tom then asked the participants to describe some of the products they chose. He then gave them further instructions: "Your next task is to make one change to your product — you're going to innovate now — this is the part where we become innovative!" He laughed. "Your task is to make one change to your product, but that change has to ruin it. It will make it absolutely horrible. That's going to be your innovation. Make a horrible product by means of one change to the thing that you love." I turned to Angela to discuss how to change the cheeseburger but it was clear that she had already had something in mind. She told me with a smile, "Let's soak it in water, the bun and the beef, everything. This seems like a nice way to ruin a good cheeseburger, no?" I agreed. Soaking a cheeseburger in water seemed like an excellent way to ruin it.
Tom continued by instructing everyone, "Now you get a full minute to take the ruined version of your product — don't change it anymore, you're stuck with it — but think of somebody who would be willing to pay you money to buy that product. So you have to identify what's good about it, what's better about it compared with the original product, why someone would be willing to pay for it. But," he cautioned, "the person who is going to pay for it can't be a masochist and it can't be used as a paperweight — it has to have a real use, OK? There has to be a real market that is willing to pay real money for this ruined version of your product. And if you have extra time you can name it and come up with a campaign." Angela and I turned to our soaked cheeseburger. Who would be willing to pay for such a disaster? The mere thought of our "product" was unpleasant. After a few minutes of reluctantly tossing around ideas in which neither of us truly believed, Angela, knowing that we had to come up with something in the next ten seconds, suggested in an almost apologetic tone, "How about branding it as a combination of food and drink for the person on the go?" She paused, almost too embarrassed to continue. "That way, you get your food and liquids at the same time," she finished her thoughts. We remained silent. I wondered if the rest of the workshop would be as senseless as this exercise and if I had made my long journey for nothing.
After collecting a few ideas — all unconvincing — Tom gave the participants a long explanation about the rationale behind the exercise. He started with a reassurance: "This was a silly exercise but it demonstrates one of the most fundamental principles of our method, which we will now learn." Angela and I listened attentively, eager to learn what kind of principle could justify ruining a perfectly fine cheeseburger.
Accidents Are Good to Think With
Tom explained that one of the key obstacles that prevent people from coming up with innovative ideas for new products and services is different kinds of cognitive fixedness they have with respect to existing products and services. One type of fixedness is "structural fixedness," which prompts people to approach an existing product or service as something whose parts can be arranged temporally or spatially in only one way: "Structural fixedness, like all types of fixedness, is usually there for a very good reason — or at least at one point in history it was there for a very good reason." Tom showed a slide with a picture of a refrigerator from the 1970s. "We like to show refrigerator freezers as an example of structural fixedness because decades after the first refrigerator was invented, where was the freezer placed? On top. Until at some point somebody said, 'Maybe they can be side by side, maybe on the bottom,'" he said while showing a slide with a picture of a new refrigerator model. "Why did it persevere for so long, the freezer on top? What was the original refrigerator? An icebox. And you wanted the ice block to be on top because of physics — cold air dropping down. And later, even though they had compressors rather than ice blocks, it didn't matter because they still saw it as one piece — the freezer on top." Gabriella, a facilitator in her late thirties, added that because of such fixedness, "you have to find a different trigger, a different starting point to come up with something surprising." Asking consumers what new things they might want or letting product developers hypothesize about this might yield a steady stream of ideas, but those ideas are likely to be identical to existing products and services because of consumers' and product developers' cognitive fixedness.
If a product's form becomes ossified and taken for granted, Gabriella explained, then a good strategy for coming up with innovative ideas about this product would be to cast its form into doubt by changing it, much like accidents might do. "Are you familiar with the example of the Post-it or sticky notes?" she asked. A few of the participants smiled affirmatively. "They were actually looking for more adhesive glue, but they accidentally came up with the weaker glue. In a way, it was a ruined product, but it was also an opportunity because it could provide an answer for the need for the sticky notes. So a manufacturing error can be a very solid trigger for a new product." This idea intrigued me. How can a manufacturing error be approached as a feature rather than a bug? "Accidents are basically opportunities for innovation," Gabriella continued. "Things that are broken are opportunities for doing things that are better. Now," she said in a reassuring voice, "we are not in the business of just ruining products or making bad things happen around us and saying, 'Wow, this is the best thing that's ever happened to us.' We are actually doing the manipulation of form using thinking tools and templates in a systematic way." Tom added that Brandnew's method of innovation (henceforth the Method) consisted of strategies of systematically engineering "in our minds" hypothetical accidents in existing products and services. Those hypothetical accidents are likely to trigger innovative ideas for new products and services by prompting the innovator to find the function that a "ruined" product or service might be able to perform for a consumer.
The invention of the Post-it notes by the company 3M has become a popular case study in the business management literature on innovation (Molotch 2003, 45), one that many of the workshop participants were familiar with. Gabriella used this case study to make it clear that the Method approached accidents as an effective trigger for innovation. In the business innovation class I attended, whose focus was the Method, the teacher, Dan, a man in his late fifties who is an internationally recognized expert in marketing research, new product development, and diffusion of innovation, discussed another standard case study of accidental innovation, Ivory soap, whose floating features are believed to be the result of a manufacturing accident. Like the Post-it note, Ivory soap is frequently found in lists of "products [that] were happy accidents" (Wong 2011). After describing to the students the story of Ivory soap, Dan concluded, "So the process was the same — there was an accident and someone tried to understand the benefit of this accident. The point is that I do not have to wait for this accident. I can generate in my mind all the right accidents using specific kinds of templates." To paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss's (1991, 89) statement about the function of animals in myths, accidents are good to think with in the world of business innovation.
In these and other commentaries Brandnew's innovators reassured their audience that the fact that the Method approaches accidents as an effective trigger for innovation does not mean that it is based on random trial-and-error experimentation. As Gabriella told the workshop participants, "we are not in the business of just ruining products or making bad things happen around us and saying, 'Wow, this is the best thing that's ever happened to us.' We are actually doing the manipulation of form using thinking tools and templates in a systematic way." Brandnew's method of innovation is based in the notion (unpacked in detail in chap. 3) that it is possible to generate ideas for innovative products based on the careful and systematic analysis of the history of the formal changes that successful products went through in the past. Such an analysis allows the innovator to detect the patterns that underlie the "evolution" of successful products, synthesize those patterns into a limited number of "templates," and methodically apply those templates to existing products to change their form. By trying to think of the functions that the new and, initially, strange forms might be able to perform for consumers, the innovator can generate ideas for how existing products might "evolve" into "future" innovative products. An example frequently used by Brandnew's facilitators is the promise by Domino's Pizza to reduce the price of its pizza whenever delivery takes longer than thirty minutes. An analysis of this innovation reveals that it is based on the creation of a new dependency between two components of the product that were previously independent of each other: the price of pizza and the time of delivery of the pizza. The Method stipulates that many innovative products are based on this formal transformation, which can be synthesized into a template. This template can be applied to existing products and services from highly different domains (including to existing innovation strategies) in order to generate ideas for their future innovative versions. An example of a potential innovation generated based on this template would be a drinking glass whose color turns red when the temperature of the liquid it contains is above a certain threshold. A new dependency is thereby created between two previously unrelated components of the product: the glass's color and the temperature of the liquid it contains.
At the same time, Brandnew's facilitators made it clear that a modicum of contingency does play a role in the Method. This is why they found it useful to use the trope of the accident as a chance-based event that can function as "a very solid trigger" for generating ideas for new products by breaking people's "cognitive fixedness" or habituated modes of thinking about existing products. Their expert knowledge, so they argued, consists of their ability to develop strategies that generate a delicate balance between predictability and unpredictability, or what I call "structured contingency."
To be sure, societies have found different ways of facilitating structured contingency that might be conducive to cultural creativity. For example, Ulf Hannerz has argued that the modern city, and certain sites within the city, can be regarded as social structures for organizing and generating productive contingency:
The café ... the amateur society for learning, the book store, the feuilleton can thus all serve as the instruments or arenas of quickened and not very predictable cultural flow. In a way, as Simmel suggested, urban life as a whole can be richly serendipitous, involving accidental and unexpected experiences and discoveries. Yet institutions like these bring an even greater concentration of this quality of life. (Hannerz 1992, 209–10)
Indeed, a key trend in contemporary managerial theories and practices has focused on the purposeful engineering of productive contingency precisely along the model of the Viennese café of the late nineteenth century. For example, an increasing number of biosciences buildings are designed today specifically "to encourage creative sociability arising out of and fueling further unpredictable interactions. From cafes to temporary dens to informal meeting rooms to walkways that force their denizens to interact, the idea is clearly to encourage a 'buzz' of continuous conversation oriented to 'transactional knowledge' and, it is assumed, innovation" (Thrift 2006, 293; see also Eagle 2004; Lange 2016). These are strategies of "not so much taming as harnessing chanciness to produce 'small miracles'" (Thrift 2006, 286).
However, the Method is different from these forms of facilitating structured contingency. Consider the fact that Hannerz has argued that although purposefully walking to a café might seem to border "on the nonserendipitous," "it is on the whole an undirected search, a strategy of situating oneself on the scene of surprises" (Hannerz 1992, 210). He has made this qualification to redeem rather than condemn this strategy, that is, to legitimize it as a genuine strategy of cultural productivity that is akin to experiencing the "urban swirl" because it is unhindered, "undirected," by preexisting guidelines or blueprints (Hannerz 1992, 171–216; Welz 2003). In contrast, it is precisely because such strategies are too open ended and unreliable in terms of producing a stable pipeline of innovative ideas that the innovators I worked with do not plunge into the "urban swirl" that is beyond the walls of their conference rooms or make do with chance interactions with people from different departments in their business organizations when they need to innovate. They prefer instead to develop and master rational rules and procedures for generating a very specific form of structured contingency that can systematically and reliably produce ideas for new consumer products, services, and processes across different domains. Understood in these terms, routinized business innovation emerges as an undertheorized form of cultural creativity.
A Challenge to Anthropological Theories of Innovation
In anthropology, innovation has frequently been discussed in the context of studies of cultural evolution and change. One intellectual source of modern studies of cultural evolution and change can be traced to early anthropological efforts to theorize cultural diffusion and similarity. Anthropologists considered cultural similarity between different groups to be the result of diffusion and dissemination of cultural elements rather than independent invention in multiple loci. They similarly thought of cultural dissimilarity as more likely to be the result of copying errors in the process of diffusion (Boas 1896; Kroeber 1940). These early theories thus deferred "explanation of local changes with reference to diffusion from afar. Independent invention was recognized as an alternative to diffusion, but little effort was made to theorize innovation" (Fitzhugh and Trusler 2009, 203). This early focus on "diffusion from afar" and neglect of "independent invention" comes to the fore in a report supervised by Margaret Mead, Boas's student, in 1953 for UNESCO, titled Cultural Patterns and Technical Change. The report focuses on "the ways in which changed agricultural or industrial practices, new public health procedures, new methods of child and maternal health care, and fundamental education" (Mead 1953, 12) can be introduced by external experts to cultures "in areas of the world which can visibly benefit from the knowledge which the peoples of other areas have" (9), using contextually sensitive knowledge about such cultures so that they "will be disrupted as little as possible" (12). The report's description of the attitudes toward change in five cultures or case-studies is telling. These cultures either introduce change on the individual rather than societal level (75), "cope" with unforeseen events via unsystematic improvisation that essentially leaves the cultural status quo intact (109), copy new practices from "neighbouring tribes" but only insofar as these practices can find a place within the existing cultural "pattern" (140, 168), embrace change when it doesn't fit the cultural pattern only when it is introduced by "conquerors ... by fiat" (140), or embrace and assimilate "foreign ways" (149) rather than invent new ways in the context of an "unshaken conviction that new ways do not mean the dissolution of [the] society" (150). The possibility of independent invention, let alone its theorization, is entirely ignored.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: The Ubiquity and Ambiguity of Routinized Business Innovation
1 Robinson Crusoe in Manhattan: Planned Accidents Are Good to Innovate With
2 “Putting This Mess into a Structure”: Cultural Contradictions and Discursive Resolutions
3 “Listening to the Voice of the Product”: Human Creativity Displaced
4 The Post-it Note Economy: Understanding Post-Fordist Business Innovation
5 Clutter: Unpacking the Stuff of Business Innovation
6 “Life Design”: The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation
Conclusion: Institutional Myths of Innovation
Notes
List of References
Index