Innovation as history making. ontological design and the disclosure of the new

Innovation in Practice Pilot 2010

Innovation in Practice


DISCOURSES IN INNOVATION 1:
DISCLOSING THE (K)NEW:

LEARNING, SKILL ACQUISITION AND THE
PRODUCTIVIST LIMITS OF INNOVATION THEORY



INNOVATION AS CREATIVE DESTRUCTION:
SCHUMPETER AND BEYOND



INNOVATION AS HISTORY MAKING:
ONTOLOGICAL DESIGN AND THE DISCLOSURE OF THE (K)NEW

Benoît Godin
Innovation: The History of a Category

Genealogical History of the Category of ―Innovation‖

Innovation and the “novelty” of human creation

Innovation as ―creative novelty‖ is produced by the
interrelationship between the three concepts of imitation,
Invention, and Innovation

Innovation as a “break with the past”

Michel Foucault
The Archaeology of Knowledge

By episteme, we mean. . . the total set of relations that unite, at a
given period, the discursive practices that give rise to
epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized
systems. . . . The episteme is not a form of knowledge
(connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the
boundaries of the most varied sciences, manifests the sovereign
unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the sovereign unity of a
subject, a spirit, or a period: it is the totality of relations that can be
discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one
analyses them at the level of discursive regularities

Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans.Sheridan, A. M. Harper Collins. New York.

Michel Foucault
The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

The fundamental codes of a culture - those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its
exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices - establish for every man, from the very
first, the empirical orders with which he will be dealing and within which he will be at home. At the other
extremity of thought, there are the scientific theories or the philosophical interpretations which explain
why order exists in general, what universal law it obeys, what principle can account for it, and why this
particular order has been established and not some other. But between these two regions, so distant from
one another, lies a domain which, even though its role is mainly an intermediary one, is nonetheless
fundamental: it is more confused, more obscure, and probably less easy to analyse. It is here that a
culture, imperceptibly deviating from the empirical orders prescribed for it by its primary codes, instituting
an initial separation from them, causes them to lose their original transparency, relinquishes its immediate
and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible
ones or the best ones; this culture then finds itself faced with the stark fact that there exists, below the
level of its spontaneous orders, things that are in themselves capable of being ordered, that belong to a
certain unspoken order; the fact, in short, that order exists. As though emancipating itself to some extent
from its linguistic, perceptual, and practical grids, the culture superimposed on them another kind of grid
which neutralized them, which by this superimposition both revealed and excluded them at the same
time, so that the culture, by this very process, came face to face with order in its primary state. It is on the
basis of this newly perceived order that the codes of language, perception, and practice are criticized
and rendered partially invalid.

Foucault, M. (1970) The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Vintage. New York. p xx-
xxi

Luc Boltanski and Eva Chiapello
The New Spirit of Capitalism

―As an existing concept, constructed around contemporary
ideas, technologies and research, associated with a specific
vocabulary, models of causality and mathematical models, and
formed to offer an alternative to hierarchical algorithms,
‗network' naturally enough finds itself mobilized by capitalism.
Employed in academic works in economics and the sociology of
work - disciplines that helped to provide management with its
theoretical foundations - it was almost bound to invade the
literature addressed to cadres that we have studied. This is how
the forms of capitalist production accede to representation in
each epoch, by mobilizing concepts and tools that were initially
developed largely autonomously in the theoretical sphere or the
domain of basic scientific research. This is the case with
neurology and computer science today. In the past, it was true of
such notions as system, structures technostructure, energy,
entropy, evolution, dynamics and exponential growth.‖
Boltanski, L and Chiapello, E. (2005) Trans. Ellliott, G. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. London. p. 104

Manuel Castells
The Network Society

Haridimos Tsoukas
Complex Knowledge. Studies in Organizational Epistemology

Open Ontology/Enactivist Epistemology/Poetic Praxeology

The world in which we exist – and thus ―innovate‖ within – can only be truly
understood according to the ―complex‖ logic of an:

“Open Ontology” as opposed to a ―Closed Ontology‖ – that is a perception of the
world or the nature of our existence that sees it as being in a constant state of flux or
change, and the future as ―open, unknowable in principle‖ and always holding,
―the possibility of surprise.‖

An “Enactivist Epistemology” as opposed to a ―Representationalist‖ one – that is a
perception of the world, or a theory of how we understand it, that recognizes the
central role of our own ―enactive‖ participation in its construction, rather than in its
ability to transparently ―re-present‖ some absolutely determinable truth or reality.

A “Poetic Praxeology” as opposed to an ―Instrumentalist‖ one – that is, similarly to
the ―enactivist‖ position, an understanding of how our own individual creative
development, utilization of, or taking up of those ―practices‖ that inform those
contexts in which we exist, also contribute to the transformation of that background
of historically available ―practices‖ that condition those contexts – much in the
same way that a poet transforms the language which they use through their
utilization of it.

Pheonomenology/Pragmatism/Cybernetics/Systems Theory

William James - January 11, 1842 – August 26, Heinz Von Foerster born November 13, 1911 –
1910 October 2, 2002

Henri Bergson born, 8 October 1859 – 4 January Stephen Toulmin - 25 March 1922 - 4 December
1941 2009

John Dewey – born October 20, 1859 – June 1, Stafford Beer – born September 25, 1926 - August
1952 23, 2002

Alfred North Whitehead born 15 February 1861 – Humberto Maturana September 14, 1928 –
30 December 1947
Alasdair Macintyre - 12 January 1929
Ludwig Wittgenstein - born 26 April 1889 – 29
April 1951 Richard Rorty – born October 4, 1931 – June 8,
2007
Michael Polanyi - March 11, 1891 – February 22,
1976 George Lakoff - May 24, 1941

Martin Heidegger - born September 26, 1889 – Francisco Varela - September 7, 1946 – May 28,
May 26, 1976 2001

Hans-Georg Gadamer - born February 11, 1900 – Charles Taylor - born 28 January 1948
March 13, 2002

Gregory Bateson – born 9 May 1904 – 4 July 1980

Process Philosophy, Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Pragmatism,
Cybernetics, Systems Theory, Cognitive Science, Enactive Mind

Complex/Emergent/Enactive/Collaborative
Clay Shirky - Charles Leadbeater - Chris Anderson - Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams

Gareth Morgan
Images of Organization

Catherine Malabou
What Should We Do with Our Brain?

Slavoj Žižek
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce – The “Logic” of “Fetishistic Disavowal”

―Not to replicate the caricature of the world: this is what we
should do with our brain. To refuse to be flexible individuals who
combine a permanent control of the self with a capacity to self
modify at the whim of fluxes, transfers, and exchanges, for fear of
explosion. ―

―To ask 'What should we do with our brain?" is above all to
visualize the possibility of saying no to an afflicting economic,
political, and mediatic culture that celebrates only the triumph of
flexibility, blessing obedient individuals who have no greater merit
than that of knowing how to bow their heads with a smile.‖
Malabou, C. (2008) What Should We Do with Our Brain? Trans. Rand, S. Fordham University Press. New York.

Donald Schon and Chris Argyris
Single and Double Loop Learning

Single-loop Learning
Single-loop learning is an active process of organisational enquiry
that results in the modification of the theory-in-use to keep
organisational performance within acceptable parameters based
on values and accepted norms. The values and norms themselves
– the governing variables – are not changed (Argyris and Schön,
1996, p.20).

Double-loop Learning
Double-loop learning (Figure 1) involves the exploring and
sometimes painful reconsideration of values and strategies. This
can be done individually or on behalf of an organisation when
agents reassess the effectiveness of the organisational values.

Double loop learning is a critical part of an organisations culture of
it is to maintain unity of vision and purpose during times of
conflicting requirements or environmental change.

Joseph Schumpeter
Innovation as Creative Destruction

Henry Chesbrough
Open Innovation

“Open” vesus “Closed” Innovation

Closed Innovation – Centralised R&D

The institution of the central research lab and internal product
development was thus a critical element of the rise of the
modern industrial corporation. Centrally orgaizatized
development were central to companies' strategies and were
regarded as critical business investments. R&D Functions were a
salient feature in the knowledge landscape of the economy,
relatively insulated from the universities and small enterprises,
relatively unconnected to the government, and largely self-
contained.

Underlying Logic

The logic underlying this approach to innovation was one of closed
centralized, internal R&D. At its root, the logic implies a need for deep
vertical integration. In other words, in order to do anything, one must
do everything internally, from tools and materials, to product design
and manufacturing, to sales, service, and support. Outside the fortified
central R&D castles, the knowledge landscape was assumed to be
rather barren. Consequently, the firm should rely on itself - and not
feeble outside suppliers-for its critical technologies.

Xerox

Similarly, Xerox needed to make its own toner, its own copier, its own
light lens, and its own feeding and sorting subsystems in order to deliver
high-volume, high-quality xerography to its customers. Because Xerox
was pushing mechanical and electrical systems father than anyone
else in its applications, there was no available supplier base with which
to work. During the early years, Xerox found that it even needed to
make its own paper; to get the optimal paper characteristics that
would feed well through its copier systems.

Erosion Factor 1:
The Increasing Availability and Mobility of Skilled Workers

Despite the company's dominance, the mobility of disk-drive
engineers caused IBM's leadership to erode over time. An engineer
named Al Shugart left IBM to go to Memorex, where he helped
Memorex improve its hard-disk drives that plugged into IBM
mainframe computers. Then he left Memorex to start a company
called Shugart Associates' pursuing a new kind of hard-disk drive, the
8 inch disk drive, intended for minimal computers and workstations.
Eventually when he fell out with the backers of Shugart, he left to start
another new company, called Sea-gate, which made still smaller 5
inch drives for personal computers. With each job change he made,
Shugart took a substantial number of people with him to the new
company. Each of Shugart's new start-up companies was thus able to
hit the ground running.

Erosion Factor 2:
The Venture Capital Market

Prior to 1980, little VC was available in the United States. Although
there were start-up companies that arose from people who migrated
out of large firms, these new enterprises had to struggle to find capital.
The ability of companies to attract older talented staff to due new
venture was also impaired by a lack of adequate capital to justify file
risk of leaving a well-capitalized company for an unknown start-up
company.

Erosion Factor 3 :
External Options for Ideas Sitting on the Shelf

The earlier tensions between the incentives of the research group and
those of the development group gave rise to a buffer inventory of
ideas sitting on the shelf. The tensions between these functions are not
new, but now there is an important difference. As a result of the
combination of erosion factors I and 2 there exists a second, outside
path to market for many of these ideas.

Erosion Factor 4:
The Increasing Capability of External Suppliers

When companies like IBM wanted to increase the performance of
their early mass-storage systems, they found that they could not rely
on external suppliers to supply components of sufficient technical
capability in sufficient volume with high quality. More generally,
companies seeking to create new products and services in the
middle of the twentieth century found that the surrounding
environment lacked the requisite knowledge, production
experience, and financial capital to serve as reliable partners in
building the materials, components, and systems needed to serve
the market. Thanks to the confluence of Many of the factors
already noted, such as tile expansion of universities and university
enrollments, the availability of well-trained workers to companies of
all sizes, and the increased presence of VC, the external supply
base is much more developed that it was prior to WWII

Open Innovation
New Attitudes, Directions, and Practices

The traditional paradigm that companies used to manage industrial R&D is
indeed over in most industries. But that does not mean that internal R&D itself
has become obsolete. What we need is a new logic of innovation to replace
the logic of the earlier period. Companies must structure themselves to
leverage this distributed landscape of knowledge, instead of ignoring it in the
pursuit of their own internal research agendas. Companies increasingly cannot
expect to warehouse their technologies, waiting until their own businesses
make use of them.

The new logic will exploit this diffusion of knowledge, rather than ignore it. The
new logic turns the old assumptions on their head. Instead of making money
by hoarding technology for your own use, you make money by leveraging
multiple paths to market for your technology. Instead of restricting the
research function exclusively to inventing new knowledge, good research
practice also includes accessing and integrating external knowledge. Instead
of managing intellectual property as a way to exclude anyone else from using
your technology, you manage IP to advance your own business model and to
profit from your rivals'

Disclosing New Worlds:
Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity

Hubert Dreyfus – Fernando Flores – Charles Spinosa

Hubert Dreyfus
Phenomenological Philosophy and critique of Artificial Intelligence

Fernando Flores
Engineer, Economist, Politician, Systems Theorist, Cybernetician, Business Consultant.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores
Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design

Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana
Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living.

Purpose or aims… are not features of the organization of any machine
(allo or autopoietic); these notions belong to the domain of our discourse
about our actions, that is, they belong to the domain of descriptions, and
when applied to a machine, or any system independent from us, they
reflect our considering the machine or system in some encompassing
context.

Maturana, Humberto and Varela, Francisco. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living,
Dordrecht: D. Reidel

J.L. Austin
How to Do Things With Words

John. R. Searle
Speech Act Theory

―Performative Utterances‖ and ―Illocutionary Acts‖

For both Austin and Searle language does not simply ―re-present‖ some ultimately
verifiable reality, truth, or fact that it unproblematically mediates - and can thus
be consensually agreed upon – indeed as Austin originally points out this ―truth-
value‖ concept of language is only one part of the nature and function of
language. It also – in terms of what both he and Searle will ultimately call
―illocutionary acts‖, ―performative utterances‖, or ―speech acts‖ – also embodies
or ―performs‖ reality, facts, or truths rather merely communicating them. Iconic
examples of this are sentences like: "I take this man as my lawfully wedded
husband" where the sentence is not being used to describe or state what one is
'doing', but being used to actually 'do' it.

Charles Spinosa
Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Business Consultant

The most original or primordial way in which we encounter our world
- or ―ontologically disclose‖ it – is through our ―practical‖
engagement with it rather than studying its formal characteristics.

Truly innovative or ―history making‖ modes of disclosure are ones in
which our conventional modes of understanding, ―practice,‖ or
―being-in-the-world‖ are completely transformed.

The three main ways in which we can engender this process:
Articulation, Cross-appropriation, and Reconfiguration.

―Articulating is the most familiar kind of style change. It occurs when a style is brought into
sharper focus… All articulating makes what is implicit explicit.‖

This is usually done through a process of ratification, refinement, and expediency.

Cross-appropriation takes place when one disclosive space takes over from another
disclosive space a practice that it could not generate on its own but that it finds useful.

The example that they provide for this is like when a technology like a mobile phone that
was originally designed or conceived for a business context gets adopted by the wider
community and carries with it all ―affordances‖ and modes of behaviour or use that
are/were central to that technology. Or alternatively when the ―logic‖ of human rights and
equal opportunity are mobilized by women in order to demand gender equality.

―Reconfiguration is a more substantial way in which a style can change. In this case some
marginal aspect of the practices coordinated by a style become dominant..‖

The examples that they provide for this are like when, with the advent of modern machine
technology, the process through which a rider ―governed‖ a horse and tried to
―symbiotically‖ guide it, turned into a relationship of control with the automobile, or a
master craftsman who had to respect the limitations and constraints of the materials that
he used could seemlessly bend them according to his will or when curiosity and play turns
into ―non-productive‖ facinated absorption of the internet.

John F. Kennedy
Connection of the ―logic‖ or ―identity‖ of the ―frontiersman‖ or the ―pioneer‖ that was so deeply
entrenched within the American psyche with that of the astronaut and the exploration of the ―final
frontiers‖ of space.

Indra Nooyi
Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo
The feminist ―cross-appropriation‖ of the ―logic‖ of various forms of social organization, equality,
and rights has created an entire new way of both dealing with and thinking through the
questions of gender equality.

The Internet
The ―non-productive‖ but essential nature of curiosity and play in learning is turned into fascinated absorption and
our concepts of identity and subjectivity are ―morphed‖ almost unrecognizably

Dear Chauncey:
As we discussed, I am in the process of starting a new enterprise that takes
the work that we have done together in the past to the ―next frontier‖ if you
will, by putting it in the center of what people need to cope and thrive in the
reality of our world today.

I have no doubt that the work we did together in the past, at Action
Technologies and Business Design Associates, was world class work. Among
other things, we invented The Coordinator, we developed a theory of
communication and conversation, we created a discipline for software
design rooted in the claim that an enterprise is a network of commitments,
and we created a discipline for process analysis and design rooted in the
same claim. Many people have experienced the benefits of learning to be
what we called ―the observer of the observer‖ and of developing the
capacity to design while fully engaged in action.

As you know, the central aspect of our work is the understanding that the
world is not a fixed reality. Human beings are not passive Cartesian
observers. We are intentional actors, inventors, ‗configurators‘, and
interpreters of the world.

However, we are not only intentional beings. We are also social and historical
beings. We are receptors and inventors of traditions, religions, philosophies,
institutions, laws and so forth. For everything, we depend on everyday
coordination with others.

Paradoxically, people feel more and more isolated in the increasingly global,
interconnected world. As our access to information and web-enabled networks
grows, and our capacity to connect to other people expands, people are
generally more lost as to how to articulate their identities, build a reputation,
develop new offers. Many people realize that they don‘t have the skills necessary
to navigate in a constantly changing world, but don‘t know what to do about it.
Hence, many people live in fear and anxiety about the future, and lack
confidence not only in their capacity to cope with the reality at hand, but with
our leaders‘ capacity as well. Over and over, despite the best of intentions, we
see our politicians making things worse.

Yet, there are a few who are not lost. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page and
Sergey Brin, are interesting case studies for us of people who have been able to
successfully navigate the realities of the world today. None of these men have
PhDs in management — two of them did not even finish college — yet, they were
receptive to the world around them, knew how to resonate with situations they
found themselves in, and they all invented themselves, and their companies
accordingly. As Alan Kay once said: ‖ the best way to predict the future is to
invent it.‖ But how were these people able to configure the world that they
invented? Were they born with this capacity? Why aren‘t there more examples of
people like Gates, Jobs, Page and Brin?

A simple answer is that our schooling has been focused on the acquisition of
knowledge and the application of concepts, but as knowledge becomes a
commodity, it is increasingly evident that this is not what we need to cope and thrive
in today‘s world. Instead, we need new practices that are not trivial — practices that
allow us to cope with an increasingly global, constantly changing world, where
communication is instant, and our identities are examined and at risk at all times.

As you know very well, practices are new ways of being that evolve over time. To
configure and master them requires biological transformation, social mastery and
spiritual strength. In our work together, we had some important successes in
configuring and bringing new practices to our clients. However, we were limited by
the amount of time required to ―cook.‖ Our experience showed that we could
produce practical business results for clients, but we could not produce ―embodied
wisdom‖ for the individuals we worked with without a significant amount of reflection,
a luxury that is not always available for people. On the other hand, reflection alone is
not sufficient. If people only study and read about what we are talking about, they
will not necessarily learn to act. In the end, learning happens in the body. A person is
said to ―know‖ once he or she is able to do something they were not able to do
before. As such, immersion in a space where action is required is critical for
embodied learning to take place.

Technology today, combined with the work that we have done in the past, opens up
the possibility to move people quickly from theory to practice, allowing us to produce
a significant breakthrough in the embodied learning of skills and practices that are
critical for the 21st century. One of the tools that I have been using to teach people
to navigate this new world, for example, is games — online social games. Using these
games, we have been able to create virtual laboratories for embodied learning
where people learn to:

work with others in teams;
work with other cultures;
work across distances;
create trust and intimacy with others, particularly with people from different cultures;
and

develop ―mastery of network orchestration,‖ a new term that I‘ve coined to capture
the idea of being able to mobilize many resources in a network, external to an
individual or to the organization he or she belongs to.

Innovation as history making. ontological design and the disclosure of the new

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