TL;DR: Enshittification is a term for how everything — from social media to your latte art — is spiraling into bland, corporate sludge. Blame greed, boredom, clueless institutions, AI’s mediocrity, and the “boom boom” meltdown. Creativity might still breathe, but it’s hacking up a lung. Hope you like ads.

There are times when a word just hits the Zeitgeist, and what better proof of this than the way “enshittification” went from neologism to standard vernacular during these last, shitty years. According to the Macquarie Dictionary, enshittification was the word of the year for 2024, after the American Dialect Society had given it the same accolade in 2023, but if you despite this haven’t come across the term until now, don’t fret. Whilst it has gained a lot of traction, it still seems to be popular primarily in the always-online parts of society, a word mostly used by those who enjoy nerding out over social media governance policies. You know, those sexy beasts. Still, this is an actual shame, as the term has potential far beyond the realm of the nerdy and wonky, and can be used to describe everyday phenomena, the kind we all come across. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What is enshittification? It is at heart a made-up word, coined by the very talented Cory Doctorow in a blogpost from late 2022 that was later published in Locus. This was already noted by some of us who follow people like Doctorow, but it was the follow-up blog-post, which was (again) later published by Wired in January 2023 that got more people paying attention. The reason they (well, we…) did so was because what was done in these short essays was a piercing analysis of social media platforms, one that seemed to have great explanatory power. Succinctly put, enshittification was coined to describe how social media networks decay due to corporate greed and stupidity. Doctorow’s brief definition of how this happens from the article in Wired stated that platforms tend to first be kind and useful to users, but that this is then sacrificed to be helpful to business users, after which the platform ceases to be helpful to much anyone, all in the naked pursuit of ever greater profits. Whereafter it dies, more or less slowly, and maybe this is for the best. Facebook used to feel friendly, then like a mall, and these days it just gives you the ick. Instagram used to be quirky pictures from your most fun friends, then trivial pictures from people you barely know, and now it seems to consist mainly of adverts and things trying to be adverts. This is enshittification in action.

We can all recognize something very much like this, from various spheres of life. A café starts out great, but then it starts focusing on influencers or catering clients, and after a while it doesn’t even do this well. An artist brings a new sound and a novel energy, but becomes too caught up in monetizing this by collabs and TikTok-shenanigans, and becomes… something else (Yes, Doechii, this could happen to you.). In fact, just as I was about to send this off, Ars Technica hits with an article about “the worst offenders” of enshittification, which is worth a read. What Doctorow did so well was give us a word for this, a concept that explains this particular kind of self-selected decay, a kind of rot that late capitalism seems to have few natural defenses against. No wonder it became the word of the year, at least for some. It did thus not come as a great surprise when Doctorow went one step further, in a long essay published in Financial Times (of all places), and declared that “absolutely everything” would fall prey to this rot. Interestingly, however, that essay did little to empirically discuss such a claim. Instead it is a good extension of his original point, namely that social media platforms (and similar) had managed to evade the kind of things that normally kept corporates in check. Doctorow even clarified what these constraints were: “There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labour.” (from the FT essay). Near-monopolies such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook do not have to worry about becoming worse, simply because there is little in the way of sensible competition — unless you count even shittier forms such as Temu and X. In a similar way, there has been a lack of regulation of platforms such as the ones Doctorow is railing against, as well as a distinct lack of interest among these to fix themselves (the notion of self-help he mentions). This leaves strong labor unions, which the platforms of enshittification has always identified as the Enemy, and guarded against.

So far, so enshittified. What I find strange, however, is that even though the word has been so good at capturing the vibe of the last few years, few have extended the notion. That Doctorow didn’t, beyond suggesting it, can be forgiven — it is his concept, after all, and if he’s most comfortable focusing on social media companies, we should let him focus on that. That said, you would think that such a powerful concept, with the extra kudos brought by being called out as the word of the year, would have been everywhere, utilized on everything. This has not, to the best of my knowledge, been the case. What I think is one of the reasons, and there might of course be others, is that Doctorow’s analysis seems so thorough that discussing how it occurs in other businesses would amount to gilding the lily, a somewhat mechanical exercise that at best would add some detail from various industries. To me, this is a mistake. What has been presented this far has been business enshittification, an important but still limited version of a more general principle. It makes sense to start from here, but as Doctorow suggests in the FT essay is that this principle spreads. I agree, and in fact I think that what he identifies in a special case of something that has existed as a rot not in capitalism but in modernity in general, which might have reached an apogee in our own liquid modernity (Whaddup, ZB?) but which is a potentiality inherent in the modern condition.

Being the kind of contrarian I am, I of course focus on how this emerges in creativity and in particular in corporate such, i.e. the manner in which corporations try to utilize creativity as a dynamic, as a symbolic marker, and as a set of practices. To state that corporate creativity can, in some cases, be a case of creativity enshittified will for most people seem like an obvious statement — well, duh… Yet the interesting thing here is not that corporate creativity can be afflicted by a kind of decay, but the question regarding how such decay occurs. What Doctorow noted was that business logic can and often does play a role, but I would contend this is only one of the many ways in which corporate capitalism (by any other name) can create enshittification. In fact, I can, off the top of my head, think of four more variations to this theme, one quite specific to 2025 AD, all with their attendant ailments. If business enshittification is a case of rot, in that it causes platforms to decay, I would state that we need to consider the following:

– Cultural enshittification, which isn’t so much a case of decay as it is one of anodynization, making things worse by encouraging the bland and the non-threatening.

– Institutional enshittification, which represents an ossification of that which has been, blocking things from getting better and pushing for more of the same.

– Automated enshittification, where an over-reliance on tools and algorithms ensures that the average and the mediocre crowds out the original and the interesting.

– Boom boom enshittification, where the infrastructures that used to ensure that some fresh ideas, despite everything, had a chance to break through, are actively dismantled in the name of progress — the equivalent of poisoning yourself for health reasons.

It should be obvious that in reality and in practice, things are rarely this clear-cut, and we instead see several forms of enshittification going at the same time — such as when Hollywood pushes ever-worse superhero-movies because they a) are mainly about selling ads and toys (Doctorow’s enshittification), b) something Hollywood feels it knows and is good at (institutional enshittification), and c) because the public is still prepared to pay to see one more Avengers-movie, even if it isn’t all that (cultural enshittification). Nor are the categories mutually exclusive, and there are degrees of overlap (such as the obvious one between cultural and automated enshittification — as the automation in question is trained on cultural products). All that said, I find it important to note all of the ways in which enshittification can occur, and not just get caught up in blaming capitalist logics for everything (although, truth be told, they explain an awful lot). So…

For the rest of the essay, please see: https://alfrehn.substack.com/p/1-the-enshittification-of-corporate

#1 — The Enshittification of Corporate Creativity, 2025 edition was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I write this as the crisis of 2020 (no additional explanation needed) is both calming down and speeding up. Depending on where in the world you live, the crisis is either getting more acute and overwhelming the healthcare system, or seems to be almost petering out. I have lived the era of the crisis in Denmark, where life has been very close to normal for a while now. Gyms and pools have been open for a while, and although there are still some reminders of social distancing around, life goes on much like before the crisis — if with much more emphasis on the cleaning of hands. If you live where I do, you might even think that the crisis is over, and we’re now dealing with the aftermath. What I am worried about, which is also the reason I’m writing this, is that this aftermath may be more complex, and more far-reaching, than the current debate suggests.

Everyone can see the “For Let”-signs, and read about mass lay-offs, so we know that the economy will take some time to build back up. That’s OK, we think, for we’ve weathered recessions before. Sure, there will be hardship, but being the eternal optimists humans are, some are already sniffing at the boom that follows recessions. It might take a few years, they think for themselves, but it will come just like sunshine follows rain. They might even be right. Regardless, we know that the economy has taken a hit, and only time will tell the depth and reach of the recession.

Let us assume that the facts above are either obvious or unknowable. Yes, the crisis is real, and there will be economic effects. What I am interested in here, however, is a special kind of effect, one that I think has been hidden by more immediate concerns. I have for some time spoken about an innovation crisis, but what I am seeing being created right now is something more akin to an innovation time bomb, one which might not have any greater impact in the months or even a few years to come, but which might well detonate with furious force in something like a decade or two from now. This is a time-span that we humans have difficulties with, for it is too long into the future for us to be able to think with any urgency about, yet it is also so short that our actions in the now may very well come back to hurt us whilst we’re still around and working… Just like ecological issues, that are easy to overlook simply because their impact may be massive but also quite slow, such innovation time bombs will be ignored by most people because they simply do not have great effects in the 6–12-month range that for most people is the longest planning horizon one has.

What I refer to with the admittedly dramatic term innovation time bomb is the risk that choices made in the present may turn out to be highly damaging in the long run — even if their impact might seem a net positive right now. This, as a matter that is often overlooked in discussions about innovation is the sheer slowness of the same. You might consider this an odd claim, as much of our discourse regarding innovation emphasizes speed. We talk of “innovation at the speed of light”, disruptions that seem to emerge in an instant, and about a relentless drive to be ever quicker. Such talk is however quite far from the actual reality of innovation. Sure, a few B2C apps may have been created at a hackathon pace, but most real innovation can take years if not decades to come into being.

Be it antibiotics or the internet, many truly massive innovations had a long, slow process of becoming. There was the basic research to conduct, and as anyone who has any experience in this field will tell you, this is not something you can hurry all that much. Even when the breakthrough is reached, this doesn’t mean that the innovation is market ready. Take penicillin, for instance. The flash of insight was one thing. One didn’t call it this back in the day, but Alexander Fleming’s realization in 1928 was something more akin to “proof of concept” than a finished innovation. To produce antibiotics at the scale needed for broad deployment and used would prove to be a problem that vexed some of the finest minds in the field for over a decade — as late as 1942 the total yearly US output of penicillin was only enough to treat ten (10!) patients. It wasn’t until 1944, sixteen years after discovery, that it became possible to produce industrial amounts of antibiotics. This is more common than people often realize. A thousand innovations (including the internet) have had gestation periods and development times that can be measured in decades.

If we take the full arc of innovation in consideration — how ideas are born, tested, rethought, prototyped, abandoned, picked up again, researched, experimented with, taken down the wrong path, developed anew, turned into an early version, laughed at, developed in versions two all the way to 42, made ready for production, taken to market, and slowly adopted — innovation can be frustratingly slow. This is not a criticism, for many worthwhile things take time to develop: mastery, relationships, children. What this also means, however, is that an external shock to the broader innovation system can cause issues that are not easily seen in the here and now.

Right now, we are at a situation where one such external shock has created at least two major effects, effects I here wish to refer to as innovation starvation and innovation skew. The pandemic has created an economic shock to most companies and every single country. Many of said countries have tried to stimulate the economy with packages of various sizes and types, and such stimulance has most likely been necessary. What hasn’t been fully addressed yet is how all this will be paid, particularly when it is more than likely that tax takings will drop precipitously for many governments. Similarly, corporations have of course attempted to do the best of a tricky situation, and some are even exploring investments. In both cases, however, it is starting to seem that cuts in R&D have either already been done, or will be done over the coming period.

“Wait a minute!”, I hear someone saying, “Hasn’t a lot of countries stated that they are pouring a lot of money into ‘pandemic research’?”. Yes they have, and it is part of the problem. When I refer to innovation starvation, I am referring to the tendency I am now seeing to cut R&D budgets, particularly when it comes to early stage research (this is a field where corporate investment has been declining for decades). What investments are made right now are affected by innovation skew, namely that innovation resources are now being put into e.g. virus research in something akin to a panic. Now, I am not saying that we shouldn’t research pandemics and the current virus, for obviously we should. Still, if this focus on a very current problem takes resources away from other early-stage research, we are in effect skewing our coming innovation trajectory. This might be a good thing, if there are many more pandemics about to hit us, but it still affecting the shape of innovation to come.

Taken together, these tendencies have the potential to damage future innovation capacity in a very worrying way. If — and I am caricaturing a little here — the amount we invest into R&D is cut by both companies and governments, and the amount that is invested is overwhelmingly directed to one specific area, this is tantamount to strangling off a number of potential innovation pathways. Now, the effects of this will not be felt right now, or necessarily next year. In fact, what this creates is dangerous specifically because of how invisible the damage done would be. It might not even show itself until in 2030, when we suddenly start noticing that technological development is petering out, at least in fields not directly connected to epidemology.

Now, this of course would not be a complete, juddering halt of innovation, nor would it usher in an innovation dark age. It would rather appear as a slowing down, a lack of things in the pipeline, having to invest twice as much for half the results. It would be a slow crisis, but because innovation often drives economies, it could be a crisis that feeds itself.

So what does this mean, right now? It means we need to pay attention to innovation investments, and have an open discussion about how we can fund the necessary R&D to ensure innovation potential in the decades to come. It also means that we need to talk about how a laser-like focus on pandemics can overreach, and that we also need to support things that do not necessarily answer to today’s problem but tomorrow’s. For even if we were to invent a magic bullet to pandemics, there remain many other fields that desperately require R&D — ecology and inequality to mention just two. If we set off an innovation time bomb in the now, the solutions we need to address such wicked problems may be much harder to come by when we really need them.

To summarize: Innovation takes time, a long time. It also takes resources. If we starve and skew, we may be building a slow innovation time bomb, one which doesn’t explode but creates a lack when we can ill afford one. What we do in innovation policy today affects us and our children more ten and twenty years from now than we might realize. Short term thinking, even in a crisis, is no friend of innovation. Not today, and definitively not tomorrow.

After writing the text above, I came across the following article from Vox — Many technologies needed to solve the climate crisis are nowhere near ready — which neatly shows a clear challenge ahead. Sobering, but important reading.

The Innovation Time Bomb — A Warning was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Introduction

There was unquestionably once a time when phenomena such as emotions, passion, embodiment and the likes were relegated to the very margins of entrepreneurship studies, seen as somewhat dirty and disreputable, and ignored overall. This was a time when mainstream studies and popular pundits still emphasized methods and analyses designed to emulate the hard sciences, calculations and quantifications adopted to mollify physics envy, a time where emotions seemed mostly like unfortunate errors that needed to be accounted for. Whilst there might have been some anecdotes regarding passionate entrepreneurs in more popular texts written by entrepreneurship researchers, these were often cleaned away in any more academic setting beyond teaching. The situation and the emotional maturity of the field has shifted radically over the last decades. In fact, it has shifted to the point where one could make the argument that attention to e.g. passion and affect in entrepreneurship represents the majority position, and that the attempts at clinical, quantitative and pseudo-objective analysis of entrepreneurship that is sometimes referred to as “the mainstream” is in fact the new margin. To this comes the fact that passion in entrepreneurship has, through the ideological praxis operating in the field, become enshrined as not so much a possibility than as a demand and an exhortation. Whereas there might still be the occasional professor of entrepreneurship somewhere who stubbornly insists that it is all about objective opportunity recognition and the cold calculation of probabilities, such characters are now outliers, and both ministers, professors, and heads of NGOs are singing from the same hymnal regarding the importance of following your dreams and discovering your passion. Looking e.g. to the field of startup entrepreneurship, with it’s cheerful insistence that one should “do insanely great things” and “find your Why”, we might speak of how the ignoring of passion has given way to the establishment of a specific kind of ideology, one where passion isn’t so much accepted as it is expected.

This essay will discuss passion in entrepreneurship, but more as a puzzle than a phenomenon. It will address the paradox of prescribed passion hinted at above, by way of a popular culture analysis of how passion in entrepreneurship gets inscribed, disseminated, and reproduced. In addition, the essay will address how entrepreneurial passion becomes commodified, in a manner that makes it consumable and easy to communicate to the world. As notions about passion in entrepreneurship become inscribed as simple exhortations, these can then be turned into guidebooks, posters, and various ephemera, which in turn become semiotic markers regarding the need for passion for those wishing to belong to the community, and through this cultural fetishes and icons. This also points to how passion in entrepreneurship is at least to a degree a performance, a prescribed set of linguistic and behavioral markers that are to be reproduced in order to communicate to others that one has taken onboard the culturally prescribed tenets of “proper” entrepreneurial behavior.

Rather than seeing entrepreneurial passion as an individual engagement, I will here thus discuss this as a socially constituted and prescribed feeling, i.e. something of an affect (cf. Gregg & Seigworth 2010) or even an affectation. Consequently I will also engage with the problematics of passion in entrepreneurship, inquiring into what happens when it becomes part of an ideology, a system of norms, and a set of semiotic imperatives that can be transformed into material forms. Looking to e.g. conferences for and popular literature about entrepreneurship, this essay will argue that passion rather than being the establishment of personal identity vis-a-vis an entrepreneurial project or a deeply held conviction with regards to the same, should rather be studied as part of how group cohesion is formed, how ideological purity is measured and performed, and how specific socio-moral mores are reified. Not unlike the manner in which military units use shared rituals, oft-repeated slogans, or provocative linguistic displays to create a sense of unified purpose (consider, for instance, shouts of “Semper fi!” and “No one left behind!”, not to mention more loaded and morally questionable discursive practices), the contemporary world of entrepreneurship (particularly of the startup variety) uses references to and semiotic markers of passion, living your dream and the likes not so much as objective statements about the world, but rather as ways to align people to an ideological position. In such a reading, the very notion of passion becomes problematic, and can instead be seen as having the potential of being made into a (material) resource for ideological praxis.

I will end with a somewhat provocative suggestion, namely that (research) attention to passion in the practice of entrepreneurship may in fact bring about negative consequences, and that there is an argument to be made for both more dispassionate entrepreneurship and a more dispassionate entrepreneurship studies. Whilst these critiques work on somewhat different levels, both point to the difficulty of dogmatism inherent in praising passion for the sake of passion, and reproducing Cartesian notions regarding emotion and passion versus analytics and reason. Rather than pandering to notions of pseudo-post-rationalism, what is attempted here might be described as a less affected analysis of affect, and a more dispassionate analysis of passion.

The Passion Imperative

“This is your day, This is your life, Now it is your time to Rock Your Day!”
Motivational entrepreneur Janne Immonen from janneimmonen.com (idiosyncratic capitalization preserved as presented)

The scene is an entrepreneurship event, directed primarily to university students. The event space is adorned with bunting, but is also quite dark. There is an abundance of energy drinks on offer. On stage is a moderately successful female entrepreneur who has become a rather more successful professional speaker. So far in her speech she has talked about her own journey, but has now segued into a series of encouraging comments for the audience on their entrepreneurial journey. Interestingly, these say very little about business models, cash-flow analysis, or funding strategies, and instead lean heavily on positive psychology and motivational slogans and anecdotes. She states that we need to learn to dream bigger dreams, and to believe in ourselves. We need to find the thing that we’re truly passionate about, and to let others see our passion. Love is frequently mentioned, as when one of her slides presents the quote “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life!”, misattributing this to Confucius. As she ends, she is greeted with rapturous applause.

Scenes such as these are today far from uncommon, and illustrate a marked shift in how entrepreneurship is perceived in society — a shift that is also mirrored in the academic study of entrepreneurship. Early contemporary discussions regarding the field tended to focus on analytical skill and risk-taking, seeing the entrepreneur as a curious mix of a calculating business man and something of a gambler. Schumpeter’s famous view of the entrepreneur (see e.g. Schumpeter 1942/2010) was passionately argued, but focused on the manner in which such an agent recognized and acted upon an opportunity. Kirzner’s (1973/2015) entrepreneur went even further, and was portrayed primarily as an agent who dispassionately leveraged opportunities for arbitrage. Granted, in the public discourse entrepreneurs were at times presented as victims of their passions (consider, for instance, the tale of Ivar Kreuger — see Partnoy 2010), but the passions presented were normally limited to avarice and greed, and rarely discussed with any greater complexity. An entrepreneur might have had passion — and in the various Horatio Alger-stories told about entrepreneurs such themes did come up — but this wasn’t presented as a necessity.

The theoretical study of entrepreneurship for a long time tended to marginalize notions of emotions, passions, and affect. This has led many researchers to argue that such themes should be integrated into our theorization of entrepreneurship, but such arguments have tended to ignore the manner in which affect and affective logics are always already present in the mode popular discourse on entrepreneurship, and thus cannot necessarily be divorced from the very notion of the entrepreneur — making claims to understand “true” passions or “real” affects in entrepreneurship problematic. When looking to the aforementioned popular and public discourse, we will instead discover that references to passion (explicitly, implicitly, or through alternative formulations) are not rare, but omnipresent. This takes many shapes.

In popular articles on entrepreneurship, passion is presented as a self-evident necessity for entrepreneurs — “Passion may be one of the most important characteristics of entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs will tell you that it’s this, rather than the promise of money or fame, that drives them on.” (https://www.monster.ca/career-advice/article/successful-entrepreneurs-characteristics, accessed 12.12. 2019). Popular books about entrepreneurship present passion as a key element in an entrepreneurial journey, and often works this in to the very title, such as in The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future by Chris Guillebeau (2012), Live Big: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Passion, Practicality, and Purpose by Ajit Nawalkha (2018), or Clone Yourself: Build a Team that Understands Your Vision, Shares Your Passion, and Runs Your Business For You by Jeff Hilderman (2019). Conferences targeting entrepreneurs frequently employ similar rhetorical devices, with titles such as “Lead To Passion” or referencing “a passion for business” (World Business Forum London 2020). Entrepreneurship educations likewise tend to make continuous reference to passion, such as when Bournemouth University answers their own question of who should study their MSc in innovation management and entrepreneurship by stating the suitability of it for applicants who “Demonstrate a passion for entrepreneurship and innovation” (https://www.bournemouth.ac.uk/study/courses/msc-innovation-management-entrepreneurship-0, accessed 12.12. 2019). In this latter instance, passion isn’t just something good for an entrepreneur to have, it is presented as a pre-requisite! I could list many more examples of this sort, but will spare the reader who can go on to find their own, and merely state that anyone who has spent any time looking into how entrepreneurship is discussed will have come across countless such.

What I wish to argue by this is that the passionate entrepreneur isn’t just an agent, recognizing opportunities with a passion, but also a person who has learnt to act in a way that corresponds with how the surrounding environment views entrepreneurs and expects these to behave. Our hypothetical entrepreneur has almost certainly read about other entrepreneurs, met people with specific ideas about what entrepreneurship means, and even been able to gauge how different ways of narrating his or her entrepreneurial journey are received in different ways. To be passionate is not just to enter a specific emotional state, it is also to communicate the same — and to communicate we need a shared language and a community. If said community further expects passion from entrepreneurs, the likelihood is great that passion is something that a person wishing to be seen and accepted as an entrepreneur will project. If it is seen as “one of the most important characteristics” of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs starting out may well feel it is not so much something one can choose to have or not, but part and parcel of what it means to be a “proper” entrepreneur. In this way, passion can in the social nexus turn into an imperative, and thus go from internal emotion to externally mandated performance.

Passion as Performance and Social Praxis

Wittgenstein famously stated “An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria” (Wittgenstein, 1958, #580). Here he wasn’t doubting the existence of inner experiences, merely pointing out that in order for e.g. affects or emotional workings to be understandable in context, they also need to connect to broader interpretive schemes. If someone states that they are deliriously happy, but do so in the flattest of voices and with literally no animation, we will be confused as to what they mean. They may of course still be deliriously happy, yet if we lack the faculties to communicate this in an understandable manner, those around us may struggle to understand whether we know what happiness is. For an emotion to make sense in a social setting, it needs to be adequately performed — expressions of joy are qualitatively different from expressions of sadness, and both have their audiences. Another way to state this is that emotions and affects are not only inner states, but also performances, something with a relational aspect. Passion is particularly interesting here. Happiness and sadness can at least in some cases be something that doesn’t necessarily involve an outside party. Passion, however, is always a relation to something, and stating one is passionately aroused by a partner yet unable to command any physical signal thereof puts into doubt whether the passion is true or not. For passion to be meaningful, it needs to involve something to be passionate about — stating one is passionate about oneself is rather odd. Further, passion is relational even as an emotion. If you are passionate about every kind of foodstuff, you might as well just say you like all kinds of food. To be passionate about ice-cream indicates that there are other desserts and sweet things you are less keen about, and to be passionate about a particular entrepreneurial venture at least implies that other possible ventures wouldn’t be quite as exhilarating.

So passion requires what Wittgenstein called “outward criteria”, signs that passion is indeed in play. At times, this is less than complicated. We can see passion for music in the animated faces of an audience and passion for a partner in physical arousal. However, in the case of entrepreneurship and passion, other matters come into play. Imagine a person who is setting up a startup that aims to automate search engine optimization (SEO). This person might state that they are “passionate about SEO”. How should we understand this statement? It seems to indicate that they have a deep emotional link to the process of making the content of a website align well with the way search engines such as Google rank websites, with the intent to get the website listed as highly as possible in the results of specific searches people might make. It isn’t entirely clear, however, just what the object or subject of this passion is. Is it the results of SEO? The algorithmic work itself? The terms? Or the business the person is building up around this work? All of these?

Most of the time, we ignore questions such as these as sophistry, and instead assume that the passion is in fact for the entrepreneurial process and figuration itself, in a more general manner. This is of course also in line how we understand passion more generally. When somebody says they are passionate about music, wine, or (wo)men, we do not immediately assume that they have a deep emotional relation with all kinds of music, that they are thrilled about drinking any kind of wine, or that they are prepared to engage in romance and/or copulation with any member of the opposite (or same) sex. To state one is passionate about e.g. music is to signal that one has a general emotional bond with the same, but there is also an expectation that this plays out as a discernment and a complex and full engagement with the object of passion. An oenophile will go to some lengths to acquire the right accessories for enjoying wine, and is likely to (in the right settings) show off his or her passion for wine though both rituals such as careful decanting and narrations about different kinds of nose and bouquet. Stating a passion for wine but only ever buying the cheapest or most readily available kind would make us doubt whether the claim of a passion wasn’t in reality a clumsy cover for alcoholism. Similarly, it is not enough simply to state that one is passionate about the entrepreneurial venture one pursues, one also needs to be able to show this passion, in varied ways.

What all this points to is that emotions and passion, in entrepreneurship and elsewhere, often requires an audience. Audiences, in their turn, tend to have specific expectations about behaviors and “outward criteria”, affecting the shows of affect that e.g. an entrepreneur needs to do in order to prove that they are, in fact, passionate. In this manner, audiences have an effect on entrepreneurial affect. Entrepreneurship studies has rarely discussed audiences (see, however, Frith & McElwee 2008). In cultural, media, and communication studies however, the role played by the audience has long been acknowledged, as has the active role audiences can have in changing e.g. a performance, a cultural artifact, or a text. Here, the creation of e.g. a piece of art or literature is not seen as wholly separate from audience influence, either assumed or explicit (cf. Ruddock 2001, Gillespie 2005). Authors often have an audience in mind when writing, and an engaged audience can even put active pressure on creators to change their output. Creators can also feel that there are specific modes of expression or tropes that need to be adhered to if one wants to be accepted by an audience. A romance novel where the handsome man never meets anyone to adore, but ends up being passionate about stamp-collecting, will not find great favor with the audience for romance novels.

Some might wonder what this has to do with entrepreneurship. For an entrepreneur, the audience effect is of course neither as direct nor as clear-cut. The cultural products that entrepreneurs create are not necessarily as material and well delineated as those of an author or an artists, but it would be an error to assume that this means that entrepreneurs do not have audiences. In fact, entrepreneurs have a great deal of such, all with their own demands regarding entrepreneurial performances. The most obvious audience, particularly in the early stage of the entrepreneurial process, is of course that of financiers and funders. For e.g. a startup entrepreneur to get financing, it is often necessary to do very stylized performances, known as ‘pitches’, for either business angels or venture capitalists. Sometimes this even happens in a very staged manner, with things such as pitching events and various competitions being a common theme at entrepreneurship educations, as well as at entrepreneurship events and conferences. Consider for instance an event such as Slush, which is one of the biggest entrepreneurship events in Northern Europe. It had 25,000 attendees in 2019, and a key part of the program was the Slush 100 Pitching Competition. In the finals of this, three entrepreneurs pitch at the main stage, in front of a panel of VCs and angel investors, with up to a 1000 additional viewers in the audience — not counting those following the video stream. During such a performance, an entrepreneur is of course expected to display presentation skills, their business model and its suitability, as well as a grasp of underlying data. In addition to this, entrepreneurs in such situations needs to show passion for their own idea, so as not to seem bored or unenthusiastic. The manner in which this passion is shown can be greatly affected by how the audience responds — with applause, encouragement, or icy silence. Here, the audience most obviously has an impact of entrepreneurial passion, or at the very least on how it is performed. In fact, some research suggests that the manner in which one can show passion has a measurable effect on whether one receives funding or not, and even that the time during the pitch at which one shows heightened positive emotional states matters (Jiang, L., et al. 2019). Performances matter.

Lest someone protests by stating that pitch events may be important for some entrepreneurs, but even then only momentarily, let us next consider media. In a medialized society (cf. Curran & Hesmondhalgh 2019), the capacity for an entrepreneur to gain attention through things such as magazine articles, TV appearances, or social media placements can be the difference between a successful launch/venture and a failed one. Here as well the audience comes into play. Media outlets are well aware that contemporary audiences react to heightened emotional states, leading to a situation where an entrepreneur with a shy demeanor and a flat affect can have difficulties to engage and drive ‘clicks and eyeballs’. Thus e.g. magazine articles or podcasts make sure to emphasize things such as drive, grit, and passion in the narrations they weave together with entrepreneurs, once again communicating to the entrepreneur the need to showcase passion in very specific ways, the kinds of ways that the audience is assumed to desire. There are today even specialized consultant who help entrepreneurs to craft their ‘personal brands’ in a way which makes their venture seem more like a passion project, with the requisite social media postings to support this.

Or, if this seems all too marginal for the reader, consider the very real difficulty for many entrepreneurs to both build a strong team and then retain the same. As entrepreneurs aren’t always in the position to offer the greatest salaries — there is a reason why we sometimes talk about ‘sweat equity’ when it comes to early hires in a startup — there is a great need to instill in the entrepreneurial organization a sense of a shared vision and of better times to come, and a key component of this is the passion shown by the founder. An entrepreneur who doesn’t seem to care about the company they started will struggle to attract talent, leading e.g. many founders of startups to feel that they need to ‘cheerlead’ in order to keep their teams happy and, yes, passionate. Thus performances of entrepreneurial passion needn’t be just limited to external audiences, but are also observed by internal such. There are in addition to this many other potential audiences to consider — customers, suppliers, stakeholders and so on. The capacity to perform passion in the right way can thus be an important praxis for entrepreneurs, one with clear material outcomes.

What I wish to argue by all this is that it is not enough to observe passion or the lack thereof in entrepreneurs to understand the role of passion in entrepreneurship. Instead, passion must be understood both as a performance on the part of the entrepreneur and as a social praxis where passion is in a sense the product of a complex negotiation. If said performances of passion are interpreted as being over the top, this can make an entrepreneur seem immature or irrational. If they aren’t seen as genuine enough or overt enough, this can make the entrepreneur seem unprofessional or… not a real entrepreneur. In this manner, the praxis of passion may well represent a key skill in entrepreneurship, something to master so as to not be mis-interpreted or having ones venture scuppered. Yet what is a performance without the props?

The Props of Passion — Commodifying Affect

What the notion of passion as a socio-cultural performance gives us is not merely another way of conceptualizing a complex emotional and affective state, but also a way to delve into the various ways in which passion can be exhibited. This, again, allows for us to inquire into the ways in which such performances become possible, where they are primarily played out, and what symbolic elements may be attached to the same. In other words, when we’re inquiring into passion and entrepreneurship, we need to ask ourselves how this is exhibited and performed, where such performances take place, to whom such performances are directed, and with what such performances are achieved. This obviously does not mean that only performances of entrepreneurial passion that manages to fulfill all these are real performances, but such a scheme still enables us to inquire into the multitude of ways in and through which entrepreneurial passion can be performed.

In the following, I will exemplify this with a number of cases developed from a longer ethnographic study of startup entrepreneurship. I do wish to note, however, that my interest here has chiefly been to understand overt representational practices and the commodification of certain aspects of the startup entrepreneurship nexus, so there remains many venues for the aforementioned performances I will not touch upon here, even if I have observed them. Whilst the way in which entrepreneurial passion is performed for smaller audiences — such as investors, peers, or internal teams — is highly interesting, my core interest lies in cases where passion is extended through material means and through this commodified. I am here somewhat inspired by the late, great media theorist Marshall McLuhan, an early influence, and in particular his often misunderstood dictum “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964). This was a call to pay attention to media themselves, rather than the messages they carried, and emphasized the notion that we cannot fully isolate the message from the medium. In a similar manner, I would hold that the way in which entrepreneurial passion is communicated shouldn’t be ignored, particularly as this can show us something about how the assumed surface effects of passion can in fact be the very core thereof, or at the very least Eliasian figurations of the same (Elias 1974). In the following I will visit two cases that I hope can highlight this.

Case 1: Social media
Social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram (or, for that matter, Medium, TikTok, or SnapChat) are key areas to communicate passion and thus perform the role of the passionate entrepreneur. On social media one can communicate both great successes and the everyday occurrences of a new entrepreneurial venture, and to do so in a way that can be viewed by a wide range of potential stakeholders and other audiences. The choice of where this is done varies greatly between entrepreneurs, but in the contexts I’ve studied it would seem that Facebook and LinkedIn are the key arenas, with Instagram being a quickly growing channel to communicate this specific brand of passion. One might wonder why it would be important to post e.g. Instagram-posts about just how much fun one has working in an office, but such posts and commentaries are rife if one follows particularly startup entrepreneurs. The timbre and tone of said posts can vary greatly. They can be earnest or exuberant, and at times rather sentimental. Occasionally one can find more downbeat posts, reflecting on hardships and challenges, but the overall tone tends to be very positive indeed, with no lack of posts expressing joy over just how lucky said entrepreneur is to have been given the opportunity to work with their passion. A superficial reading of such posts might even lead one to believe that these are objective and true expressions, signifying just how happy the entrepreneurs are about their chosen life.

A more careful and contextual analysis muddies this picture somewhat. Whilst there certainly are entrepreneurs that simply use social media to spread images of their energetic workplaces, much like a parent might of their energetic offspring, there is another, parallel pattern as well. A number of entrepreneurs have realized that communicating entrepreneurial passion can be something more than merely telling the world about your emotional states. Smartly deployed, it can also be a way to generate additional income, by becoming conduits and examples of a lifestyle that some want to emulate and be inspired by. A classical example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk (today often stylized as GaryVee), who started his career as an entrepreneur in the wine business (having taken over his father’s liquor store). By deftly utilizing social media, particularly YouTube, he rapidly grew this business — but also his personal brand. By way of hyper-energetic videos, and later communicating the same energy across most media channels, Gary became something of an internet darling, and later left the wine business to focus on his online persona, public speaking engagements, and a digital ad agency. Today, he still communicates entrepreneurial passion through a bevy of highly popular social media channels (YouTube: 2,5M subscribers, Instagram: 7,4M followers, Twitter: 11,6M followers, all current January 4th 2020, which should go some way towards showing that there is a good market for well-packaged narrations of entrepreneurial passion), and one could describe this — sharing motivational content and performing passion on social media — as his key business. It is here important to note that this journey from entrepreneur to influencer isn’t unique, although Gary’s success just might be. There are in fact quite a few entrepreneurs that follow a similar stratagem, in more or less explicit ways. Narrating entrepreneurial passion can in this manner be a way to commodify the same — at first as content for social media, and later possibly books and keynote speeches.

Sticking to social media for now, we can in the production of social media content that Gary Vaynerchuk and a small army of other entrepreneurs are engaged in see one form of commodification. By creating various clips, texts, images with motivational quotes, mostly addressing issues of entrepreneurship, work, and the emotional dimensions of this, they are in effect supplying other entrepreneurs and fellow travelers with a semiotic form of “passion capital” that is legitimized in the community and which can be used to signal that one holds the right attitudes of e.g. a startup entrepreneur. A GaryVee-video can in this case be a semiotic marker for entrepreneurial passion that can be used in ones own performance of the same. By first consuming/viewing it, and later sharing it in ones own social media channels, entrepreneurs can signal that they too are suitably passionate and prepared to partake in the social praxis around the same. The impact can further be bolstered by adding on your own pithy comments or even emulating other social media content. Whether their passion is ‘true’ or not matter little here. With the right social media content, passion can be communicated quite independently of any internal state (and even outsourced to an intern or an algorithm).

Case 2: Accessories
Social media is of course highly ephemeral, and showing the right outward signals of entrepreneurial passion can be something of a chore, particularly if one also has to devote energies to an actual entrepreneurial venture. In such instances, entrepreneurs may need to find more permanent semiotic markers of passion. Thankfully, startups are by now so entrenched in our societies that the broader entrepreneurship ecosystem contains companies devoted to providing the same. What I am referring to here is the plethora of material things through which entrepreneurs can communicate their legitimacy as specifically entrepreneurs, and more specifically such that serve to communicate passion without requiring the entrepreneur to do much more than purchase the props.

There are of course a set of things that have become so entrenched in our cultural subconscious as part and parcel of the startup entrepreneurs habitus that they can have an air of parody around them. Products such as Apple laptops, hoodies with tech company or conference insignia coupled with chinos and Allbirds shoes, as well as wearables such as the Oura ring have become something of shorthand for a particular kind of entrepreneur. These, however, do little to communicate passion, for entrepreneurship or anything else (except, in the case of wearables, collecting data about yourself). There is however in this realm a set of products that serve exactly that purpose, and which have become exceptionally popular in the startup community. I am here referencing things such as the posters, coffee cups, and t-shirts with pithy statements about the life entrepreneurial that are used either ironically or un-ironically to signal that a specific office or similar is, in fact, one for startup entrepreneurship. Whilst seen as ridiculous by some, they still represent a very specific kind of marker for entrepreneurial legitimacy and belonging to a community, and whilst one might see them as ephemera and marginalia when trying to theorize passion in said community, I maintain they also show the tendency for displays of passion to be commodified and standardized.

There are many outlets for such materials, but one of the most defining such is a site called Startup Vitamins (www.startupvitamins.com, last visited January 4th 2020). They supply a wide range of office products and clothing, all of them adorned with a supposedly motivational or insightful slogan, quip, or quote, and their website proudly state that these can be found in revered companies with an entrepreneurial pedigree such as Google, Nike, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Products sold on the side include obvious things such as posters, t-shirts, and coffee mugs, but also some more surprising things such as pillows and leggings. Exactly why anyone would want a pillow emblazoned with the text “A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good.” is not explained anywhere on the site. Most of their products have less wordy statements on them, and a few typical ones are quoted here (all from the site above):

“Passion never fails.”

“Think bigger.”

“Life is short. Do stuff that matters.”

“Fuck mediocrity.”

“Find your one thing and do that one thing better than anyone else.”

“Wake up. Kick ass. Repeat.”

“Be obsessed or be average.”

All of these can be bought as a poster, and most can be bought as a coffee mug or a baseball cap. Only a few can be bought as leggings, but you will be reassured that “Passion never fails” is one of them. Products such as these of course have a long history, and link back to signs at places such as churches and offices that try to communicate moral or motivational imperatives. At the same time, I maintain that they also say something about entrepreneurial passion, as these are not just products bought by overbearing office managers, but often by entrepreneurs themselves. How are we to interpret it when one such buys and prominently displays a “Get shit done” coffee-mug? What is the entrepreneur donning a pair of “Passion never fails”-leggings trying to communicate?

Such products, and the slogans on them, can in the context we’re inquiring into be seen as the end-point of semiotical marking with regards to entrepreneurial passion. By creating commodities that fully embrace the externalization of the aforementioned, Startup Vitamins is in a sense short-circuiting the discussion about passion, making it into merely a poster (sic) to be displayed. Entrepreneurs are through them no longer to actively take part in the affect, but can in effect transfer their performances of passion to inanimate objects and get on with the actual work. We could of course say that this is a false form of passion, rooted as it is in slogans and commodities, but we might also ask whether it is any worse than the forced smile of the entrepreneur presenting an idea to a bank or an investor. Further, the very existence of such objects shows that passion in entrepreneurship isn’t just a simple internal emotion, but a phenomenon that needs to be understood in a socio-cultural context where it can be appropriated and turned into a pillow.

What I have aimed to show through these two mini-cases is that passion in entrepreneurship isn’t a neutral thing or a mere background dynamic in capitalism. On the contrary, it is also an affect that can be captured, re-packaged, commodified, and turned into a soft fleece hoodie, available in sizes from XS to XXL (45 USD, does not include shipping). Whilst such a commodification (or the hoodie that goes with it) of course doesn’t capture the full gamut of entrepreneurial passion, it still remains as an object, a semiotic marker, and a signifier that a study of said passion needs to understand and come to grips with. It also stands as a marker for the curious paradox that sometimes an attention to passion can go on to create things that would seem to work directly against the same, as when an entrepreneur tries to communicate passion by dispassionately sharing the same sloganeering social media content everyone else in the community is primed to consume and re-share.

The Ideological Passion Apparatus — Against Passion in Entrepreneurship?

“(H)oc opus, hic labor est.”
Virgil, Aeneid, book 6

In his works on ideology, the philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the concept of the ideological state apparatuses (Althusser 1971). This was shorthand for sets of ostensibly apolitical institutions and formations that still restrained thinking and reiterated and replicated ideology in a society or community. Such psychosocial structures exist to train people to see the system in which they are operating as normal and necessary, and serve to support hegemony. Whilst not openly repressive, they still communicate that there are norms et cetera that one needs to follow so as to remain within the acceptable bounds of a society — police are to be obeyed, laws are to be followed, and exploitation to be expected. This notion, which follows and develops upon Marx’s notion of the superstructure in dialectical materialism and Gramsci’s notion of ideology as praxis, served to highlight that what might superficially appear to be an objective good, such as e.g. education, could also contain distinct if obscured ideological components.

Whilst entrepreneurship in and of itself transcends such a categorization, one could argue that much of entrepreneurship research does fall under it. By naturalizing and normalizing participation in a capitalist system, and not questioning the assumptions and underpinnings of said system, the field can quite easily become a model through which ideology is disseminated. I do not here have the space to fully expound upon this assertion, nor is it necessary in this context. I will instead restrict myself to noting how a preoccupation with passion in entrepreneurship can do something similar. By way of prescriptive notions of said passion, one creates a figuration of entrepreneurship where only those who are prepared to fully commit to the same, and thus are less likely to question it and its assumption, will engage. By creating a passion imperative, one is in fact limiting the number of ways in which people can engage with entrepreneurship, and rather than making it more inclusive one is using subtle ideological moves to exclude those who might be more critical or questioning towards the same. As books, keynotes, and even posters about entrepreneurship keep outlining passion as a necessity, the ways in which budding entrepreneurs feel they can behave is diminished, and an ideological streamlining is achieved.

If we are indeed interested in entrepreneurship and passion, we thus also need to ask ourselves whether promoting passion might not be a way to limit the same? As passion becomes ostensibly defined by the cases we use and the behavioral patterns we prescribe, other ways of being and engaging with the field are in effect marginalized. Further, by prescribing, reifying, and celebrating passion, one runs the distinct risk of continuing a process that is already quite far gone in the entrepreneurship community — as evidenced by countless motivational YouTube-clips and cheerful slogans on clothing-swag distributed at conferences. Thus, without a critical look on how passion is communicated and commodified (such as in the book this was to go into, which was in itself a commodity to be sold to those with an interest in passion in entrepreneurship), we risk becoming part of an ideological passion apparatus — a structure promoting specific notions of passion and insisting on the same.

Interestingly, one can currently note a certain backlash against notions of passion in entrepreneurship. As the startup boom wanes, it has become clear that despite what cheerful leggings or coffee-mugs might claim, sometimes passion does fail. Numerous wannabe entrepreneurs have found that despite their passion, and sometimes due to it, entrepreneurial ventures can end up doing little else than burning through the savings of themselves, their parents, and/or their partners. For every passionate motivational speaker touting the benefits of passion in entrepreneurship, for every researcher fond of heightened emotional states in entrepreneurial ventures, there are hundreds if not thousands of entrepreneurs who had the passion but not the skills, the fire but not the resources, the ardor but not the application to succeed.

So do we need a more dispassionate entrepreneurship studies? Yes and no. We need research into entrepreneurship that doesn’t blindly praise passion as a constitutive part of entrepreneurship, for doing so would be to work with a most limited and restricted notion of the same. We also need research into entrepreneurship that can turn a critical lens on the oddities of passion in the field, such as the praxis of social imperatives and the commodification that I’ve attempted to sketch here. That said, we also need research into entrepreneurship that takes the full gamut of passion into consideration, not as a panacea but as a phenomenon with sides good and bad, positive and negative, and as a phenomenon which can be reduced and perverted as well as elevated and analyzed. No matter what your pillow tells you.

REFERENCES

Althusser, L. (1968/1971). Lenin and philosophy, and other essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Curran, J., & Hesmondhalgh, D. (Eds.) (2019). Media and Society. Bloomsbury Academic.

Elias, N. (1978). The Civilizing Process (Vol. 1). Oxford: Blackwell.

Frith, K., & McElwee, G. (2008). “The entrepreneurial wide boy. A modern morality tale.” International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, 6(1), 80.

Gillespie, M. (Ed.) (2005). Media audiences. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Gregg, M., & Seigworth, G. J. (Eds.) (2010). The Affect Theory Reader. Duke University Press.

Jiang, L., et al. (2019). “Can Joy Buy You Money? The Impact of the Strength, Duration, and Phases of an Entrepreneur’s Peak Displayed Joy on Funding Performance.” Academy of Management Journal 62(6): 1848–1871.

Kirzner, I. (1973/2015). Competition and Entrepreneurship. University of Chicago press.

Partnoy, F. (2010). The Match King: Ivar Kreuger and the Financial Scandal of the Century. London: Profile Books.

Ruddock, A. (2001), Understanding Audiences: Theory and Method. London: Sage.

Schumpeter, J. (2010). Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. London: Routledge.

On the Prescriptions, Paradoxes, and Props of Entrepreneurial Passion was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our society tends to narrate innovation in triumphalist and only triumphalist ways. As we, particularly in the West but increasingly as a global society, have collectively embraced the notion of innovation as something always already good, always already right, always already the one prime thing to aim for and desire, this should come as no surprise. Tales of innovation tend to be tales of heroes and progress, better lives and happy customers, with a promise of greater things yet to come. Why not sing the praises of a thing that seems like such a horn of plenty? Yet this is a very narrow and blinkered way to talk about innovation. Every child knows that for every innovation that conquers the world, there is a plethora that falter and fail, for various reasons. For this reason alone we should pay at least as much attention to those cases where an innovation stumbles and falls as we do to these who succeed, but we do not. This is a shame, for this is part of why we fail to see many of the cracks in the valorized edifice of innovation, the many issues hidden from us as we stare intently at only the visible, successful top of the innovation iceberg. In the following I will present not a full attempt to rectify this situation, but merely a sketch of a singular instance of innovation failure, to show what can be learnt from this. It will be a requiem for a robot, but this sad funeral dirge isn’t just about remembering what has passed — it is a reminder that just because something is called an innovation, or might even be seen as an innovation, this doesn’t mean that what we missed was a great, good thing. Sometimes things fail for a reason.

In the years leading up to 2020, robotics has been one of the hottest and most hyped technologies. The heat and hype of course continues, and not without reason, but we can also see that some of the robotics companies that were meant to rock our world have now shuffled of their mortal coil, or to be a little less grandiose, quietly folded. Among them Laundroid, a company that well deserves to be the poster child for robotics hype. Perhaps more importantly, it is a very educational tale about innovation in our age, where novelty and shiny demos often beat out purpose, impact, or even sense.

Robots can be used for many, many things, and they increasingly are. We’ve gotten quite used to robots that mow grass and vacuum flats, and more and more often we run into robots in other areas of everyday life — scuttling about in a warehouse, making a pizza, or delivering food from Tescos in Milton Keynes. Heck, the next time you go get a drink, your bartender could be a robot. No wonder, then, that a lot of people have grandiose visions about all the things that could be delegated to our handy, helpful robot companions. We’re still a long way away from general-purpose androids, i.e. robot butlers who can take care of all of our little everyday chores, but this hasn’t stopped people from trying to bring this dream about piecemeal. One small part of this is to design a robot that could take care of folding laundry, a task that few people cherish but which must still be done with annoying regularity. Laundroid to the rescue!

The robot known as Laundroid was a much hyped product, and for a few years a mainstay at CES (the massive trade-show of the Consumer Technology Association). An early prototype was demonstrated in 2015, to an intrigued audience. The sales pitch for it stated that it would eventually develop into a full-fledged clothes-processing robot, which would be able to take a load of washing, wash it, and then dry, iron, sort and fold the clothes, depositing them in a closet built into the device. The early version would however only be able to do the last part — fold clothes and put them into a closet. The technical demands of even this less than thrilling function shouldn’t be underestimated, however. It requires computer vision, a smart system to understand what the robot is folding, and robotic arms to fold garments without doing damage to them. As a result, the Laundroid was neither small nor cheap. In fact, it was remarkable for both its bulk and its price tag. Size-wise it was big as a small fridge, if a bit deeper, and thus not something that would be easy to fit into a small bachelor-pad — or many family homes. However, the price of the robot did make sure that this wasn’t really a problem. This, as the price was set at 16,500 USD, pricing out the kind of people who would have an issue with not having enough space for it.

Who would pay 16,500 dollars for a machine the size of a fridge that folded laundry? As it turns out, not a lot of people. The kind of people who could afford it could also afford either a maid or to have everything dry cleaned, and the path towards the additional functionality proved to be problematic. Whilst I am sure a lot of people would be thrilled to be able to dump a load of laundry into a robot, and get it back clean, ironed, and folded the following morning, this merely compounds the already tricky technical issue of getting a robot to fold clothes properly. How do you do this in a machine that needs to deal with water (for washing), high temperatures (from drying and ironing), vibrations (from washing and drying), all whilst keeping track of robot arms and a bunch of optics?

In the end, Laundroid never got that far. On April 23rd, 2019, the company developing it went bankrupt, having never shipped a single unit. It turned out that the complexity of getting AI, computer vision, and robotic arms to work reliably in concert made the problem too difficult to reliably solve. A reporter from Verge reported that the demo machine he tested in 2018 couldn’t handle folding his t-shirt, simply because its black color confused the image-recognition system (because, you know, black is such a rare color for t-shirts…). In other words, the Laundroid failed, for reasons both technological and market-related. Now, here’s the truly important bit. The company behind Laundroid, Seven Dreamers (registered in Tokyo) had according to reports raised a hefty 89 million USD. Not only that, they ended up in debt to the tune of an additional 20 million USD. Let us repeat that for emphasis:

More than 100 million USD was given to and spent by a company to build a laundry-folding robot.

Regardless if you feel folding your laundry is a chore or not, realizing that amount of money went into creating a solution for something that simply isn’t that big of a problem for most people should at least shake your belief in a fully rational innovation system. In a world jam-packed with actual, wicked problems, why would investors line up to fund a very expensive way to deal with what might best be described as an annoyance? The list of reasons (sadly) reads like a checklist for modern innovation: The Laundroid was a high-tech solution, it had an AI (artificial intelligence) component, it was directed to affluent urbanites, and it was just perfect for fun demos and PR fluff pieces. The fact that it was oversolving a non-problem really didn’t matter.

So now Laundroid is no more. The money put into it of course didn’t disappear, as they went to staff, PR companies, sub-suppliers, and so on. At the same time, a lot of assumedly smart people spent time on something that never did come to fruition, and whilst the money was kept in circulation in the economy, they were also kept from other, potentially more worthy innovation projects. To me, the Laundroid is an interesting story of shallow innovation, innovation that whilst it might be novel and flashy was never bound to have all that much impact. Sure, the apologetes of innovation will say that developments here might at some point have led to other, more worthy innovation, such as robot surgeons or other fine things, but such apologetics ring fairly hollow to me — as we simply cannot know whether the future path of the Laundroid would have gone in that direction. Further, it would take quite a lot of mental acrobatics to state that right here, right now, the thing we should invest time and money on — in the name of innovation — would be developments in laundry-folding. That dog simply won’t hunt.

No matter how you read it, the Laundroid wasn’t a triumph. What its failure teaches us depends on the perspective we take on it. Was it a moon- or loonshot that simply was before its time, or was it a wasteful boondoggle that shouldn’t have been started in the first place? There is no one, clear answer to this, yet this shouldn’t stop us from discussing the matter. In fact, we should talk about cases such as the Laundroid far more, to understand the amount of money invested into projects with unclear value and impact, and to understand what happens when the grandiose stories of innovation and technology do not quite pan out. So, a requiem for a robot. Laundroid, we hardly knew ye. Yet you too were part of the grand tale of innovation, and your story deserves attention. As a warning example, if nothing else.

Requiem for an Innovation: What We Can Learn from the Sad Story of Laundroid, the Laundry-Folding… was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

(This is merely the start of a longer piece on solutions and innovation I am planning, but thought it would be good to outline it here. It is very rough, at this point.).

Even though we talk about innovation as one concept, this is of course a huge simplification, not to mention a potentially dangerous generalization. We use the same word for the tiniest incremental change, and for huge, revolutionary leaps, which is one of the key reasons people have started to doubt the concept and consider it more a buzzword than a useful analytical concept. Whilst the discussion regarding innovation has tried to address this by introducing concepts such as “incremental innovation”, “radical innovation” and “disruptive innovation”, the challenge still remains that these are not clearly delineated, and it is incredibly difficult to know exactly when an innovation shifts from incremental to radical. To this comes the problem that as good as all attempts to create typologies of it all are rooted in the problematic assumption that innovation is always a good, positive, praiseworthy thing. This, as anyone who has paid any attention to the often ludicrous things created in the name of innovation (talking trashcans, anyone?), is a problematic assumption.

I have thus started thinking about a different kind of typology for innovation, one that would use considerations that are usually missing from the innovation debate. This is in no way a complete typology, not even a path towards one, but it might still serve to sort some innovation phenomena. The key category here is actually not even innovation, but a constituent part thereof, namely “solution”. This, the inquiry into solutions, might seem like an odd place to start as it is normally always already assumed that an innovation is a solution. What is often forgotten, however, is that not all solutions are born equal. More specifically, solutions are rarely perfectly balanced, and this carries over to what we think is an innovation, and how we judge these.

Consider, for instance, the problem of getting produce to the market in a situation with long distances and limited resources (a very real problem for many African farmers). Let us assume that you are farming cassava, and the market is 40 km from your farm. Carrying the cassava is very heavy work, and walking takes a long time — both are problems the need solving, possibly with an innovation. The car is of course one innovation that’s a solution to this, but it should be noted that in our example it is in all likelihood overkill. It would be wonderful, of course, if it was affordable, but more than likely it is not in this case. A Hyperloop between this one farm and the market would be an even more extreme case of this, something that is an innovation, but ridiculous and impossible overkill for this problem. On the other end of the spectrum might be a wheelbarrow designed specifically for long distances. It does help with the problem, but doesn’t really help all that much — the work is still heavy and the trek is still long. Arguably, there is a perfect solution here, a perfectly balanced innovation, namely the bicycle. Cheap enough to be feasible and helpful enough to be a distinct improvement, it makes both the prohibitively expensive solution and the insufficient solution look bad — at least from the perspective of the farmer.

Following this, I would call the car and the Hyperloop (in this specific context, mind you) cases of oversolving. Whilst they are a solution, they goes very far with this, and might thus end up being sub-optimal. The wheelbarrow, again, I would call a case of undersolving. It does present us with an improvement, but not really a full one. With these concepts we can talk in a fuller way about innovative solutions, and at least partly escape the problem of all solutions being viewed as equal. This, however, isn’t a sufficient categorization. This, as both undersolving and oversolving can in some cases be a good thing (arguably the bicycle represents undersolving as well — whilst you can load an impressive amount of cassava onto a bike, it has distinct limitations), and in other cases a bad thing. We might thus talk of innovations falling into four distinct categories, and although these could be mapped onto a two-by-two matrix, I will save you from this (for the time being). Our categories, then, are negative undersolving, positive undersolving, negative oversolving, and positive oversolving. I will in the following discuss each one in turn.

Negative undersolving

These solutions do address the problem, but in a way that either doesn’t address the root cause or present us with enough of an improvement to truly effect change. Many users may find themselves forced to use these regardless, and thus forced to accept them as innovation, but they can also block out more effective innovations. This category would also encompass “band-aid” solutions, negotiated or hacked together solutions that even the people using them accept are only temporary fixes. In addition, it would cover cases where a new technology is used to solve a problem, but in a way that focuses more on the possibility to use a complex technology than achieving a distinctly better solution.

An example of this last kind of negative undersolving might be the FoldiMate, a piece of machinery slated for public release late 2019. This is a machine, as big as an oversized washing machine, which folds clothes. Now, were the machine to be able to do this by sorting and folding from a crumpled heap of clothes, this would be impressive. However, it can only fold things that are put into it in a specific way, effectively half-folded. So, for all intents and purposes, it is a big, expensive machine, that finalizes your folding of your clothes — an undersolved problem that wasn’t that big to begin with. If we look at “band-aid” solutions, an example of this might be carbon emission permits, and the trade in these. Rather than spurring companies and countries to cut their carbon emissions, they encourage paying for the right to pollute, with the logic that this in time will incentivize companies to cut their emissions. Whilst created with the best intentions, this innovation (arguably) ignored the core problem, and instituted new ones in the process.

Positive undersolving

Undersolving does not necessarily need to be negative, however. We can think of several cases where presenting a “good enough” or a limited solution can be a positive thing. In the startup world, one refers to this as a minimum viable product (MVP), a solution that might not have all the bells and whistles (or even functions) of a finalized product, but which can serve as a trial or stopgap solution until a more developed version has been developed. To this group we could also count “nudging” solutions, that might not in and of themselves be full solutions, but still functional in their own way.

As an example of this latter form of solution, we might consider “carb-free” diets. Now, healthy and sustainable weight-loss and wellness should preferably come from a full understanding of nutrition, eating lots of vegetables, and exercise to boot. This can seem daunting, however. Diets that in effect say “no sugar, no pasta, no bread” are a far cry from this, but this doesn’t automatically mean they are pointless. For many, simply cutting down on processed carbohydrates has led to weight-loss, which in turn may make following the diet easier, and over time entice a person to take up exercise and consider ones diet more thoroughly. The simplicity of the diet might have been a case of undersolving, but one with a positive outcome. We might see something similar in MVPs and something like minimalist tools. I, for one, have a tool on my keychain that looks like a slim key, but folds out to a knife, three kinds of screwdrivers, and a bottle opener. Whilst none of these tools are as good as a dedicated, proper tool, the fact that they are always with me means that I’ve solved more things with this “lesser” tool than with the box of tools that gathers dust in one of my cupboards.

Negative oversolving

As previously stated, I use the term oversolving to refer to cases where one either present a too overwrought or expensive/resource-intensive solution, or cases where the solution focuses more on additional functionalities (or other add-ons like excessive design) than the original problem. This would include adding “smart” or digital aspects to solutions that do not necessarily need them, but also the creation of technologically complex but thus also fragile solutions for context where the upkeep of such might not be feasible.

An example of the latter can be found in many developing countries, where well-meaning NGOs might for instance have installed a fancy, engine-driven pump for a well, ignoring the fact that the community might lack both the tools, the know-how, and the spare parts to repair it when it invariably fails. Examples of the former are even easier to find. My favorite examples, that I’ve often used when keynoting, have been household items such as jars and trash bins that have been equipped with digital sensors and internet capabilities. You can today buy e.g. a trash bin that reacts to voice commands in various languages, and which can also send you a notification to your smartphone when it needs emptying. The obvious question here is: “Is having to open a trash bin really so big of a problem that voice-activation plus a motorized lid is a sensible solution, and does anyone really need to check their smartphone to realize they should take out their trash?” Whilst one might create some (far-fetched) scenarios in which this might be helpful, I would still count intelligent trash bins as an oversolution, and not a positive one. The same could be said for “smart socks”, an existing product that can literally send you a notification when their color has started fading. Because actually having to look at the socks to ascertain this was seemingly a problem that needed solving.

Positive oversolving

In the interest of fairness, it needs to be stated that oversolving can in some cases be positive as well. I consider a solution to be positively oversolved when the solution presents us with alternatives and functionalities that add value and which we didn’t even consider before. Technology often progresses by giving us solutions to problems we didn’t originally consider as problems simply because we were unaware of alternatives.

A classical example of this would be digital photography. Previously, we enjoyed photography, although having to process analog film was both slow, complicated, and expensive. Digital photography first solved the problems of sending in analog film to be processed, but also happened to bring with it additional solutions — such as being able to take far more photos, only process the ones you liked, being able to do post-processing yourself, and using photos in novel ways. Another example, which in part is wedded with the first one, would be the iPhone. Originally viewed as an expensive and over-designed phone, and thus a case of negative oversolution, it turned out to be a platform that enabled us to use our phones in ways we simply could not have imagined a few years earlier.

It should be noted that these categories are, to a degree, a matter of interpretation. What to some might be a case of negative undersolving, might to someone else be a case of negative (or even positive!) oversolving. Something that might look like negative oversolving may mature into a case of positive oversolving, and so on. The point, here, is not to establish a rigid, moralizing framework, but rather to create a way to talk about innovations from the perspective of solutions and how well geared these are to the problems they address. By talking about over- and undersolving, not to mention positives and negatives in the context of innovation, we might gain a deeper understanding of the problems inherent in designing solutions, and move away from the romantic idea of the perfect innovation.

Innovation as a Balancing Act: On Undersolving and Oversolving Problems (Early Draft) was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Colleagues, students, random gawkers, I wish I could say that I’m happy to see you here today, but I am not. In fact, I do not want to give this lecture at all, and particularly not as I do it because I am dying. To paraphrase the old Woody Allen-quote, I do not want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying. And just like Mr. Allen, I’m not afraid of death, but I do not want be there when it happens. But it seems I won’t, and I will.

Now, my university is aware of this, and in their usual sensitive way has realized that they might be able to cash in on me shuffling off my mortal coil. Not content with the fact they’ll now save on my salary and be able to replace me with some adjunct or robot or other, they have insisted I give this last lecture, which they will record and try to monetize over social media. Seeing as there seems to be quite a few people who enjoy watching Randy Pausch and his epigones, my university immediately though that getting professors to give a final lecture would be a nice little earner. They may be craven, but you can’t fault their business logic.

For today, death is a big business. The funeral industry alone is worth over $16 billion annually, and this is not counting the many, many additional revenue streams of what I’ve come to call the thanatonomy, the death industry. My entire research life has been dedicated to studying those things business professors usually ignore, so maybe there is a morbid logic to me addressing this, the final frontier of homo œconomicus, in my final lecture.

We’ve long assumed that economy and business is the land of the living. In studying it, we’ve been used to looking at how living bodies, well organized, can do things like run factories, build roads, and construct wondrous things. Similarly, the living body needs sustenance, sleep and spectacle, which has created industries for food, retail, real estate and entertainment — all for the living. It is the living who come up with ideas that can be turned into innovations and new products or services, and it is the living who consume the same. So death seems to be a most marginal phenomenon in the economy, a case of housekeeping and sanitary processing more than anything else.

Yet in our post-industrial society, this is not altogether true. There is value in death, even to the point where some of us seem to become more valuable by dying. Consider Randy Pausch. Before he started dying, he was a rather obscure computer science professor. I’m sure he was liked by his colleagues and students, and his career seems distinguished enough, but I’d imagine even he would have agreed that he was no rock star. And then he started dying. His famed final lecture became an internet sensation, he got on Oprah, and even had a small role in a Star Trek-movie. His book became a bestseller, and seems to generate income to this day. In many ways, we might say that dying was great business for Randy, or at least his heirs (metaphorical or otherwise).

Now, some might think I’m denigrating poor professor Pausch by saying this, but I do not. What I am saying is that the thanatonomy of Pausch was considerable, and that for some, he truly was worth more dead than alive. This is not as rare as you might think. Consider rap or rock stars. For many such, dying can be the ultimate business move. Jim Morrisson, the Lizard King of the 1960’s, died when he still struck a romantic figure and could be capitalized upon. Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. were both gunned down, and this turned them from relatively successful artists to highly monetizable legends, with impressive track-records of post-death releases. Elvis, who died in 1977, made more than $50 million in 2016, and is on track to have a far better 2017, as it represents the 40th anniversary of his death . Michael Jackson has made more than $100 million every year since he died. For some, death is just part of a greater business cycle.

So as I stand here, being filmed by a university who is not about to let my death be an impediment to my exploitation, I am entering an exciting new step in my business… well, not business life, for obvious reasons. Perhaps business process would be more apt. I’m sure there will be at least some attempt to capitalize upon the fact that I’m dying from such a wildly unlikely reason, with the attendant sensationalist interpretations. I will not go into the reasons I’m dying, as I’m sure you all will have heard the stories, but I would like to point out that the more extreme of these, such as the suggestion that I contracted my disease by having unprotected sex with an alien, sadly are false. I can assure you that if I was dying as the result of a mad sex-romp with an alien, I would not only own up to this, I would publicize this far and wide. Dying from being the first human to have done the nasty with an alien life form would have been the ultimate nerd bragging rights, so I am sad to say that my passing will be somewhat more mundane.

This, I am sure, will not stop people from trying to cash in. On some level I’m happy to know that once I’ve died, there will be a biography, no matter how sensationalistic and flawed. I also enjoy the thought that some of my works will be republished as a result of me dying, although I do think it is churlish of the university press not to give me an advance simply because “you’re not dead yet”. I know publishers want to know you make your deadline, but this is just silly.

What all this means, however, is that I foresee that little business engagements such as this last lecture will be caught up in the irrevocable logic of consumer society, and will need to become ever more spectacular. Randy Pausch could make a big impact with just good cheer and a few pushups. Each last lecture after that one will need to up the ante, finding new hooks, in order to feed the demands of the thanatonomy. Looking to how the business of death no doubt will develop, we’ll see increasingly wild attempts to stand out, to differentiate, to “disrupt the death industry”.

It is with this in mind I have decided to make this lecture something more than a lecture, and instead make it a kind of action research. I am very happy to see that so many of my university colleagues are present, and particularly that many from the administration, the same administration that insisted I turn my death into a business engagement for the university, are here as well. You see, I came prepared in more ways than one. You will notice, if you test them, that the doors are locked. You may also wonder where my PhD-students are. They have, on my instruction, barred the exits.

They knew, you see, that I would be bringing this semi-automatic rifle, with the intent of making this not just my last lecture, but also the last lecture of a few others. Calm down, and sit down! I don’t need extra incentive to use this. I will not start shooting indiscriminately, and you will notice I’m aiming at the front row, mainly populated by heads of administration from this university. Now, since they wanted to cash in on my impending death, I’ve decided to add in a spree-killing as a kind of last bonus, my final way of giving back to the university. This will surely drive up the bidding for my biography, and make both my left papers and those of the university administrators far more valuable.

By killing quite a few colleagues and administrators I will also make the university far more famous, and ensure that the video being recorded will be an instant viral phenomenon! Think of the branding gains alone! Yes, yes, you may say that I’m killing innocents, but in the death industry, it’s the bottom line that counts, right? Don’t worry, I will end this all by turning this weapon against me, and thus truly ensure that this is a last lecture.

You see, I do have a deeper point with all this. The growing industry of last lectures is such that we will reach this point sooner or later. What I’m trying to do here is to cut to the chase, and stop this trend. This, as this my last lecture really cannot be topped. Now…

Cla-click.

A Different Kind of Final Lecture was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is an old adage, sometimes called “Hanlon’s razor”, which states the following: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. This is fine advice for many a study of work and organization, but it seems especially apposite when talking about innovation. For when we look to organizations, and their attempts to innovate, the problem is rarely that there is someone out there actively trying to sabotage innovation, or otherwise have malicious intent towards it. On the contrary, ask around in organizations, and every single person you talk to will say pretty much the same thing — innovation is very important and they try to support it at every single turn. And the truth is, people are earnest when they say this. Most everyone of us believes in innovation, and believe that we are, in our own way, doing out bit for it.

Still, most organizations struggle with innovation. The consensus about its importance doesn’t help, nor does the amount of resources directed towards it. When people become aware of this, they then start finding things to blame. We blame leaders for not demanding more, we blame the organization for not dedicating enough resources, and we blame “a fear of failure”. We blame people for being unambitious, and leaders for not supporting us. We, generally, play the blame game.

But the blame game contains an implicit assumption that there would be some kind of malice involved. It implies that someone, somewhere is withholding resources, or fears failure, or keeps expectations low. And while this might be an natural supposition, it doesn’t mean that it’s correct. In fact, Hanlon’s razor would say that it might just as well be a question of… well, if not stupidity, then at least errors in thinking. More to the point, blaming the wrong thing and missing out on a far more problematic truth.

It is with this in mind I suggest you consider the following errors in innovation thinking, when considering your organizations struggle with the same. They are errors I’ve come across in numerous organizations, big and small, and they represent the kind of skewed thinking about innovation that whilst not malicious in any way can still do major damage. Without further ado, the three errors, followed by an analysis of each:

1. Thinking that unrealistic expectations won’t hurt innovation.
2. Thinking it’s a lack of resources, when it’s really about resource mismatch.
3. Blaming a fear of failure, when the real problem is the fear of success.

When high expectations lead to low innovation

We’re taught that innovation thinking should be all about thinking big. Whether it’s “moonshots”, “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”, “10x thinking”, or simply “thinking big”, we’re constantly being told that in order to innovate, expectations should be put high, then higher still.

What is discussed less often is just how difficult this is, and what happens when the organization and its culture isn’t ready for it. Yes, if you have a culture that has worked its way up to doing moonshots, and which has support in place for it, this can be good advice. However, when expectations go from being “audacious” to being unrealistic or just impossible, the opposite is true.

Leaders who do not understand the subtler elements of innovation cultures often miss out on this, imagining that a culture can be built merely on raising expectations over and over again. What they fail to see is that when expectations are raised without a simultaneous strengthening of support, you are in fact creating innovation stress. This can take many forms, such as defeatism, but at heart it means that the organization stops believing that management is serious when asking it to innovate, as it has only emphasized what they want, not how it might be achieved.

What this can lead to, over time, is that people in the organization no longer see innovation, when mentioned by leaders, as something meaningful. Instead, they hear concepts such as “10x thinking”, and considers them mere buzzwords, without any real meaning. As management doubles down by raising expectations ever higher, the malaise worsens. A negative spiral has been created, and high expectations result in low, or no, innovation.

So do not blame lack of “Big Hairy Audacious Goals”, for introducing them without a proper support system can be more damaging that simply sticking to the expectations the organization has today.

It’s not the lack of resources, it’s their mismatch

When talking about support for innovations, the number one thing that people in organizations tend to blame is the lack of resources. This too is a natural reaction, as we all dream of what we might accomplish had we just a little more time, a little more money, and a slightly bigger and better network. What people tend to forget is that from an organizational perspective, this doesn’t need to be remotely true.

Whilst we rarely address this, innovation doesn’t always need or even respond well to additional resources. Also, most organizations already have ample resources for innovation and change. What is missing, then, is not resources in general, but the right resources in the right places at the right time.

Managers who come face to face with employees blaming dwindling innovation on a lack of resources often react by trying to scrape together some, but just as often end up throwing good money after bad. This, as e.g. money in and of itself does precious little for innovation. It can do more only when it is matched to a real problem, connected to a true innovation need.

Yet organizations often look only to the total sum of resources they believe they’ve dedicated to innovation, rather than to the bigger, more complicated picture. What I’ve seen in companies has often been that resources are dedicated without any real understanding of how they match with the problem at hand, or, for that matter, with other resources dedicated to the issue.

Thus you can in a modern corporation come across innovation projects with lots of people engaged with them, but without the financial resources to truly test anything, as well as ones with huge budgets, but without the allotted personnel or time to use this in an intelligent fashion. In organizations lacking metrics and operational oversight, I’ve seen hugely challenging problems getting minuscule support, and incremental developments getting both all the resources and all the attention.

Further to this, companies sometimes even lack proper metrics for understanding their general resource matching. More often than I’d care to remember I’ve sat with top management bemoaning their lack of resources for innovation, yet unable to state whether they couldn’t achieve a higher rate of return by re-channeling their current spend on things such as marketing or even operations.

To blame a lack of resources is thus an error in at least two ways. One, you can’t blame a lack of resources before you’ve been able to clearly say what you’d need them for and show how additional resources would support the ones you already have. Two, organizations always already have resources, but are too often so wedded to their legacy spend that they’re unwilling to refocus and redistribute. That’s not lacking resources, just like not finding time for exercise often means we’d rather spend it watching Netflix…

Fear of success can be a bigger problem than fear of failure

The last of our three addresses culture directly, and blames the inability to innovate on people’s innate fear of failure. Again, this seems like common sense, as we’ve been told that risk-aversion is bad and a culture where failure isn’t punished is good. What this truism hides, however, is that in an organization, the fear of success can well be a far bigger problem.

Fear of failure addresses us as individuals, particularly the way in which we would like to be seen as competent and successful. As innovation always contains the potential for failure (or, more to the point, fails far more often than it succeeds), it stands to reason that there is a part of us that will fear innovation, simply because it might make us look foolish.

In an organizational setting, however, this effect is both offset by the possibility to spread the risk, and overshadowed by the political implications of the fear of success. For a person or persons embedded into an organizational hierarchy, innovation success can mean many things. It can mean positive things such as bonuses and the likes, but it can also mean a fundamental shifting of power bases. With each new successful innovation, old competences become less valuable, new networks start pushing out old, nurtured ones, and established positions in a hierarchy become less secure.

The kicker is that if the fear that tempers innovation in a company is mis-diagnosed, this can make the situation worse rather than better. The fear of failure can be offset by making sure that projects are allowed to fail and people are allowed to take greater risks. This in turn can support a fear of success, as the attendant increase of failures will support the story that it is the existing framework that truly works and shouldn’t be questioned.

Fear of success can subconsciously make people less likely to try out workable ideas, and instead focus on flights of fancy, and further fear of success can skew projects and resources away from the core parts of the organization, the ones most in need of challenge and questioning.

So, blame fear of failure if you’re sure that is the only thing that ails the organization. But remember, blaming one thing can be a smokescreen for not blaming another, and sometimes success can be far more disruptive than failure can.

Changing the Innovation Blame Game

The point of this little text is in fact rather simple. Leaders should of course listen to the way in which people talk about innovation and the challenges with the same, but at the same time be aware of how the blame game works. Calling out a lack of resources can be a correct analysis, but it can also be way to ignore how resources need to be balanced and matched. Expectations should be set and communicated, but they need to be realistic — you can’t blame a sausage factory for not having disrupted oncological treatments. And fears may well control an organization, but you need to understand which fears do, and which just get blamed.

So what is a innovation leader to do? In short, to realize that the blame game can go both ways. It can highlight, and it can hide away. It can represent a genuine complaint, and an erroneous one. A leader must be able to parse and interpret such innovation gripes, and find the truth behind them. This can be done by looking to the data, by improving the metrics used, or simply by asking people to argue for their complaints.

What is not enough is to take the innovation blame game at face value, or even worse, start playing it yourself. Leaders have a responsibility not to let mistaken ideas flourish in the organization, to call out errors when they see them, and to combat stupidity — even when it isn’t the least bit malicious. It’s not always the nicest thing to be doing, but it’s one of the most important, if innovation is to succeed.

The Innovation Blame Game — Three Critical Errors in Organizational Innovation was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Originally published on https://www.speakersassociates.com/blog/innovation-ambition-how-its-lost-and-how-you-can-regain-it

Innovation, that beloved business concept, has never wanted for discussion or commentary. Everyone talks about it. Still, our current way of addressing it suffers from a troubling mismatch. There is no end to conferences, books, and magazine articles that in one way or other laud innovation. Yet this talk doesn’t always translate to action, or enough action. More to the point, innovation can mean many things, some less ambitious than others. And due to this, we can have lots of talk of revolutions and disruptions, whilst seeing very little of either.

In my work with organizations, this can and has become quite tangible. Particularly so in big corporations. These do talk of innovation, almost as a mantra. At the same time, there is in many of these a distinct tendency to go for the easy way out when it comes to innovation. For instance, I was recently working with an large IT company. They are fast-growing, have healthy profits, and state that innovation is at the heart of all they do. At the same time, their time and resources go into updating their existing products. Their few more innovative projects tend to falter due to employee disinterest. The CEO focuses on existing clients, and the COO wields tremendous influence. As a results, their margins have started to drop, and much of their turnover comes from older products. They represent a typical case of low innovation ambition, and it may yet be their doom.

Not all innovation is created equal.

While we tend to talk of everything novel as “innovative” or “an innovation”, this is a problem, not a solution. When any- and everything can (and is) referred to as an innovation, the word starts losing meaning. We can see this when companies market even the minutest change to a product an innovation. We can see it when even bureaucracies talk of supporting innovative services. After a while, the concept starts losing meaning, both in society and inside a corporation. The former is problematic enough, and deserves separate study. What the latter does is that it quells a company’s potential of innovation. Employees stop caring, and no longer push radical ideas. Companies create evermore pedestrian improvements, lessening society’s innovation as a whole. Step by step, statement by statement, innovation withers.

Talking the talk

The interesting thing here is the role played by innovation talk. Books and magazines insist companies are creating great innovations, and we belive them. Gurus tell us that we live in the age of innovation, and we trust them. Consultants lure us with tales of great innovation to come, and we nod along. Still, all this talk can be a ruse. It lulls us into a false sense of security, one where we abdicate our responsibility to innovate.

This was exactly what had happened at the IT-company I worked with. They had brought in cool consultants, and a hip brand agency. They had innovation slogans plastered across their offices. They had the word in their slogan. Their marketing material declared that their every product was an innovation. Their managers used buzzwords and catchphrases right out of the innovation literature. Phrases straight out of business magazines peppered company presentations.

Still, this didn’t translate to enthusiasm among the employees. In interviews, I came across both apathy and confusion when it came to innovation in the company. Several of the people I talked to said they didn’t know what managers meant by innovation. Others expressed a lack of interest in the very word. One stated:

I have no idea if we’re innovating or not. The bosses say we are, but down here we’re doing what we’ve always done. I laugh when I see a product I’ve written code for called an innovation. I know it’s an update. Sometimes it’s not even a great one.

What we see happening here is a case of innovation, as a concept, losing meaning. By overusing it, and applying it in indiscriminate ways, managers were suffocating it. Employees no longer saw it as meaningful, and as a result stopped caring.

In the land of lost ambition

The short way to put this is: When everything is an innovation, nothing is. In order for innovation to be meaningful and inspirational, it needs to stand apart. What had happened in the company I’m describing was the opposite of this. Nothing stood out, and as a result, employees started thinking that nothing mattered. In fact, the tendency to praise everything as an innovation lessened innovation. It isn’t difficult to see why.

Innovation, real innovation, is always risky. It carries costs, it can fail, and you can look foolish for trying it. At the same time, you’re supposed to be innovative, an innovator. For an employee, this can seem like a difficult thing to navigate. But the current vogue for declaring all things innovations creates a way out! Employees, realizing they can eat their cake and have it too, start gaming the system. They engage with innovation projects, but only safe ones. The more ambitious projects get little attention. Why why take the risk when you can be “an innovator” without it?

We can even see this on a company level. When media (and the stock market) rewards you for incrementalism, why try for radical? As long as there are those prepared to call your new doohickey an innovation, why try to change the world?

The vapidity of our innovation discourse incentivizes companies to keep innovation ambition low!

Reinvigorating innovation ambition

What we need, then, is to reinvigorate innovation. Not by another poster, not by another workshop, but by making the word meaningful again. This isn’t achieved by repeating the word over and over, but by being mindful about how it’s applied. Further, we can do this by making innovation the exception, not the assumed rule. This latter point will no doubt confuse some. Shouldn’t we try to make innovation an everyday thing? No.

Trying to make innovation a daily, constant thing is a recipe for exhaustion and lethargy. When innovation is a break with business as usual, it energizes. When it becomes a constant demand and a routine, it invites obliviousness. Managers who are nonchalant about the concept create cultures nonchalant about innovation. Innovation should be an exception, but not an anomaly. Instead, we should celebrate it as an exceptional thing, a special case. Incessant repetition of the term only makes it seem less special, more mundane. Boring, even.

Neither is innovation invigorated by celebrating every possible thing. Innovation participation is important, sure. But if everyone gets an award every time, we incentivize turning up, not doing great. Also, if we celebrate every small step forward, we lose sight of the heights we can scale. Most organizations can achieve great things, if there is ambition and drive. Bland innovation talk, and tepid leadership, can make this a nigh impossibility.

Towards the ambitious organization

So what is a leader to do? Ambition isn’t created out of thin air, and often a key issue is what a leader stops doing. Shouting louder about innovation won’t help, nor will bullying employees. Instead, intelligent leaders will consider the ways they themselves may have neutered discourse. Leaders need to consider what their organization incentivizes — talk or impact. Is saying the right thing more important than changing things? Then it is time for a change.

Say “innovation” less often — but mean it when you do. The easiest way to start is to talk less about innovation. Yes, this sounds counterintuitive. Still, the key element that stifles innovation ambition is the overuse of the concept. Refer to innovation when you mean major, impactful change. Refer to improvement when you’ve released a minor update to your product. This will communicate intent to the organization, and stops muddying the waters. You should of course keep demanding improvements, and development, and change. But by not calling everything innovation you make the latter sound important. You make it sound worth pursuing. You make it sound worthwhile.

Tell a powerful story. You build ambition by example, and stories are the greatest examples. It isn’t enough to tell the organization that it should innovate more, it needs to have the context. Emphasize what kind of innovation story you feel best captures true ambition. Highlight what innovation can be, at its very best. Narrate the impact innovation can have, not for your company, but for your customers and users. Populate your story with true-to-life characters, and show the change in their life. Pick one, great story, one to repeat and retell. Rather than me-too slogans about innovation, have a story that illustrates impact. This will be far more meaningful for the organization, and better as a guide for the employees. Only when we know what story we’re supposed to be part of, can we try to be heroes in the same.

Incentivize impact, not branding. In every major corporation I’ve worked with, there’s always been one. One person, who has built their career on being close to “innovation”, or even being “an innovator”. Often this person knows the right things to say, goes to the right meetings, and is keen to present new buzzwords. Less often are they the real innovators. In an age of innovation talk, mastering this can be a career path. Still, the intelligent leader looks beyond the branding aspect, and asks about impact. Who pushes an ambitious agenda, and who hides behind a PowerPoint? Who tries to solve big problems, and who dresses up small enhancements with big words? Even with lipstick marketed as innovative, a pig with it is still a pig…

Focus on change, not slogans. Calling yourself a “disruptor” is easy. That’s why so many are doing it. Enacting true change is far harder. Your marketing material may be punchy, but what have you changed? If your “innovation” disappeared from the market, would anyone (besides you) notice? Would anyone care? What you say about your company and its products matters less. It is the change you make possible, in the lives of your customers, that matters. Also, what change are you bringing to the world? Are you creating a better gadget, or are you part of creating a better world? The former might be novel, the latter deserves the label “innovative”.

Be audacious. You, and your organization, can be so much more than you are. The world is full of wicked problems and huge challenges. As a society, we struggle with massive issues. We struggle with how to live a good, healthy life in a world with limited resources. We struggle with how to bring the good that innovation can bring to the many rather than to the few. With struggle with how to progress without burning out the planet in the process. You can be part of this. Not be repeating “innovation” as a mantra, but by making it meaningful. You can set your ambition goals to “audacious”, and choose not to take the easy way out with innovation.

It is my firm belief that every organization can be innovative. Each organization I’ve worked with has had resources, ideas, and competencies a-plenty. Not every organization has been able to channel this, though. Many have made innovation a word to throw around, not an ambitious goal for the organization. Many a leader I’ve worked with has failed to make their innovation strive ambitious. Many have failed to energize their employees, and through this under-utilized their capacity.

We can do better. You can do better. Many organizations may have lost their ambition, but the right leader can regain it.

Will you be that leader?

On Innovation Ambition was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you need to know something in order to be able to teach it? It sounds like a silly question, and one that should be answered with a resounding “Yes!”. We all remember the old joke about “those who can, do — those who can’t, teach”, which is at heart a snide comment about those who teach without really being able to do it themselves. We love laughing at academics who make pompous statements about how to lead, or how to excel, or how to become an entrepreneur, when we know that if they knew any of that, they probably wouldn’t be academics.

At the same time, one can be good at analyzing things without necessarily being afflicted by that same thing. We don’t expect psychiatrists to have suffered psychosis, nor do we require that a therapist has suffered divorce and depression before we accept them. Further, great football players do not necessarily become great coaches, and many of the best coaches and trainers have never played professionally. Often, what makes one able to teach is not the fact that one has an exceptional talent that one imparts, but rather that one has a capacity to spot a lack or a weakness, in oneself and others. Teaching a talent is often difficult, as we don’t always have full insight into why we’re good at something. I, for instance, know how to write, but I really don’t know why. I have some ideas, but if I had to tell someone about my method, I’d end up saying things like “Well, I go to this café, and… well, write.” Not very helpful. On the other hand, we often know our own limitations very well. Intimately, even.

So when I was asked what I’ve taught my children, with a particular emphasis on creativity and creative doing, I thought long and hard about whether I’d really taught them anything of the sort. But then it hit me. I’ve actually made them better versions of myself in at least one field.

You see, one of my more defining traits is a specific kind of social anxiety. To state this in clearer language: I’m often uncomfortable in social settings, particularly ones where I have to interact with strangers. This might seem odd, since my life is a constant interaction with strangers. On any given day, I might be tasked with working through a strategy with a board of directors I’ve never met before, or to go on stage in front of thousands of strangers and tell them how to become better at innovating. For people with social anxiety, this could be a nightmare, the thing that triggers panic-attacks and makes life unbearable.

I, however, manage quite well in such settings. In part this is because I’ve trained myself to be great in such settings, and in part this is due to the fact that I can go into a role and play that to perfection. This is how I can seem incredibly self-confident on stage (some would say “insufferable” or “arrogant”) and yet be quite anxious at the same time. But it’s actually not those settings, those calm and structured business settings, that I struggle most with. Instead I battle with something far more mundane.

I fear going into a restaurant without knowing whether there’s a free table. There, I said it. I can freak out about going to a café I don’t know, or not being sure about how to order at a bar. It’s a small thing, but it is very real to me. I often find these small, impersonal social interactions far more troubling than arguing with a CEO in front of hundreds of reporters, as odd as this might seem. This is also at the root of what, if anything, I’ve taught my children.

“–Sean, can you run in there and ask if they have a table for three?” He’s a good kid, a smart kid, and has an easy way about him. He fears nothing. From very early on, I sent him to do little errands, ask people stuff, call restaurants for bookings. He never asked why. Sean comes back and says he’s arranged a table for three people, and if it’s OK it’s towards the back. I smile and say yes. He has no idea he’s eased my social anxiety.

“–Line, go ask that lady if they have this in black.” She’s quick-witted and cute, with a temper and an easy smile. She fears very few things. She likes helping out — although she also has the teenager’s laziness about her. When she goes looking for a job, she doesn’t ask me for advice, except after the fact. She doesn’t know I sometimes find it uncomfortable to talk to shop assistants. Not always, but sometimes. She chats happily with this one, and brings me back a black polo.

Sean needs a job for the summer, and wants me to help him get one. I refuse. Well, not necessarily refuse, but rather suggest a deal. He’ll apply for a job as a salesman. Not even a nice sales-job, but one of the worst there is. He’ll sell door-to-door, with a range of products that are, frankly, ridiculously overpriced. If he can do this for two months, I’ll guarantee his salary and he can keep his commissions too. So, if he sells well, he’ll make a ton, and even if he fails completely, I’ve guaranteed his income.

The job is awful, but he does well. He drives around in the country-side, talking to farmers and workers in the field. He has coffee with old couples, and chats with firemen and whomever he can find in the tiny villages he goes to. He knocks on doors and turns up at people’s front yards. He does well, considering.

In part, I’ve always tried to push my children into the kinds of social settings I fear. They have become far more social than I am, unafraid of engaging, ready to chitchat with complete strangers at the drop of a hat. Through this they have become popular in their social circles, got opportunities they’ve otherwise never gotten (they’ve both hung out with royalty and CEO’s, and Sean has even picked up work as a male model), and become better salesmen and leaders. They will go on to make great things, and I fully believe they can eclipse me in many, many ways in their coming careers.

I write this not just to praise my children, although I greatly enjoy doing so. I write this to acknowledge that what we can teach our children goes far beyond our strengths, what we know we’re good at. For me, the greatest gift we can give our children is to not let our own weaknesses live on in them, to try to make them better human beings than we ourselves are. I look at myself and see anxiety and other foibles, so I try to think of ways to not burden my children with this. At times, looking at my brave and social children, I think I’ve succeeded pretty damn well.

The One Thing I’ve Tried To Teach My Children Is Something I’m Awful At Myself was originally published in Thinking Askew on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.