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We make a contrast between innovation and invention. Innovation:.
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We make a contrast between innovation and invention Innovation: • Spillover from adjacent domains, bringing together familiar practices, concepts, and ideas from proximate social worlds. Well- known elements are reshaped for new purposes. This is the much studied topic of knowledge recombination. • Improves on ways of doing things Invention: • Transposition across distant social worlds. Such introductions into foreign domains are often transgressive. Much more likely to fail. But when they take root, such moves can create social invention - - new persons, kinds of organizations, industries. The new interstices that are forged have unexpected feedbacks and alter their domain of origin, and may cascade to remake social, political, and economic landscapes, for better or worse. • Changes in the way things are done
Critical Questions: Our distinction inverts Schumpeter, and his evocative language of “creative destruction.” In early 20th century, he thought invention was more common but innovation in products and services more challenging. We see innovation as both constant and consequential, but think novelty is the harder task to theorize. Our conceptualization leads to three questions: • Who are the creators and carriers of social invention? • How do we think about which boundaries are crossed and what kind of distance is travelled? • How accessible/vulnerable are social systems to perturbation? Can we move beyond the language of crises, exogenous shocks, windows of opportunity and theorize poisedness?
Who are creators/carriers? • Clear answer in P&P is amphibious actors, with links across multiple networks, affording them opportunity to staple together contradictory principles. (Or think of related Harrison White argument that identity can accrue from mismatches.) Or consider ethnic identification, a common case of toggling between identities. • Insight – people carry skills and networks with them as they move through the life course. Innovation and invention are result of the intersection of people and their biographies.
How do we think about boundaries and distance? • Porosity– are multiple network flows near vs. far? Are borders segregated vs. overlapping? • Familiarity– does something already exist in our imagination and is comprehensible vs. unintelligible and not readily understood? • Moral dimension – is something inappropriate (as science and commerce initially was, but later morphed into intellectual property) or acceptable?
Invention Sabermetrics:
“Words take a back seat to spreadsheets and metrics as more aspects of life become quantifiable and apps track even our moods. It looks as if the nerds have won.”
Baseball Story • Began with a poor team (Oakland As) who because of cheap owner had little money for players. “Billy Ball” spread to other poor teams, such as Tampa Bay Rays, but then Big Data became legitimate when wealthy Boston Red Sox used it and won World Series in 2004. • Then it moved from GMs assembling a roster to how managers played the game, especially defense. Players now hire personal statisticians. • Transposition of sports and statistics exploded in 2008 with sports statistican Nate Silver and his 538.com. Obama election and subsequent re-election brought stats into politics. • Back in the world of the academy, suddenly new career options for statisticians, and new courses sprout at CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, etc.
Ferran Adria, El Bulli Early-1980s
Multiple network transpositions • Best chef in the world • Spain replaces France as center of culinary universe • Cooking as alchemy, in Le Monde, no less (feedback dynamics!) • One of 100 most influential people in the world • Cooking as gold – economic alchemy • Chef as Pope!
CLOSED: Transformed into a creativity foundation • 3-Michelin-star restaurant • 5-times Best restaurant in the world • 2 Million requests for a table • A “culinary Mecca” / a “portal to another dimension” What is(was) elBulli?
elBulli 1983-2005 General Catalogue 1062 | alphabet soup[ 2004 ]
elBulli 1983-2005 General Catalogue778 | griddled vegetables with charcoal oil [ 2001 ]
elBulli 1983-2005 General Catalogue772 | mini-corn cob cous-cous with avocado pear [ 2001 ]
elBulli Innovation at the interstices (#23) Knowledge and/or collaboration with experts from different fields (gastronomic culture, history, industrial design, etc.,) is essential for progress in cooking. … Sharing this knowledge among cooking professionals has contributed to this evolution. (Synthesis of elBulli cuisine, 2006) ART DESIGN INDUSTRY SCIENCE
Dialogue with Art “What he [Ferran] gets from me is this exchange of ideas; when we talk, we throw them on the table "bam, bam, bam" - like a speedy card game. He doesn't like to ask directly about art, he's smarter than that, but he creates situations where you talk, and he gets his knowledge from there. This curiosity is a thing we have in common.” - Vicente Todolí, former director of the Tate Modern Museum, London, U.K.
Luki Huber (Designer) • Focus: “food transporters” • Shapes an object until the team begins to see its use… Dialogue with Design
Dialogue with Science Source: Harvard SEAS
6 months/year R&D (Barcelona) • 5000 experiments • 125 new recipes, techniques and concepts • 100% new menuforthe restaurant annually elBullitaller elBullirestaurant • 6 months/150 days (Cala Montjoi) • Season: April–Sept (June-Dec 2010; January-July 2011) • 70 employees • 50 diners • serving only menu: 45+ dishes Separating exploration and exploitation
Culinary Invention • Since our earliest ancestors, cooking has involved fire and heat. Adria uses cold - - liquid nitrogen, and water baths. • Initially, the transgression was limited to world of food - - Spain replaces France at pinnacle, and changes model of a restaurant - - set meal, completely new menu annually. • More recently, movement into art, design, R&D labs, ethnic politics, academy, and open source.
How does culinary innovation get re-purposed,and possibly become invention? As national identity? As economic development? As new art form? As open source community? Adrià now runs a creativity consulting firm (think Stanford’s d.school), and teaches a course with chemists and physicists at Harvard
Gastón Acurio and New Peruvian Cuisine:National identity movement creating social, educational & business opportunities
“Poisedness” How do macro and meso-level forces amplify or inhibit micro-level efforts at novelty? Well-connected actors frequently attempt to innovate, whether out of necessity, creative impulse, or deeply conservative or protective concerns. Such efforts are fairly routine, and lots of innovation happens from these attempts. But structural conditions can, on occasion, give rise to new categories of actors capable of recognizing and realizing opportunities for invention. With two current projects, one examining unsuccessful and successful attempts to create a research botanical garden in NYC at beginning and end of 19th century and the other looking at more than 120 different efforts to develop a classification system for Bordeaux wine from 1780s to 2005, we look at how invention is both geographic (moves laterally to other cities and across the Gironde River) and cognitive (a new template spills over to other activities). As the new models spread and ramify, they have unexpected feedbacks and rewards in their domain of origin, empowering the new persons.
