"Efficiency is not the winning card. The competitive game is won by businesses that know how to balance entrepreneurial and managerial modes of organizing in the innovation process."

We Need Science

The trial-and-error approach to innovation is risky, ambiguous, and offers uncertain ROI. We need to take a more predictable approach to developing innovative solutions.

Let There Be Art!

Art combines the masterful application of knowledge and technique with the creative impulse to produce new things of value and meaning. To innovate, we must be willing to take chances, to be inspired by possibility, and to bring forth in real time.

Opening Statement

Business and art are two -- or some would argue, the -- primary sites where innovation happens in our societies. They are, however, also structurally ordered into a dichotomy that often has business on the "useful" side and art on the "amusement" side. In its present form, this order is not older than the changed attitude toward nature and culture that took place in the 17th century. In the 1940s, this change was given the name "The Scientific Revolution," which of course confirmed the seriousness and importance of science (controlling nature) while art was simultaneously relegated to the realm of play and leisure.

Traditionally, business is understood as applying economy (and social sciences) as knowledge to harness science (in everything from R&D to applied technology) in analyzing, organizing, and managing resources into competitive arrangements of collective work in a market. Art is instead approached, understood, and explored by means of aesthetic knowledge (in its modern form since the 18th century) and associated with beauty or entertainment achieved through mastery or perfection. Business and art thus also represent the knowledge domains of economy and aesthetics, respectively. Historically, these are regulated according to views of society that designate the ordinary/work/everyday as a place proper for economy, and the extraordinary/leisure/weekend as the place proper for art. There is a battle here between "Lent" and "Carnival" -- between, on the one side, the interest-driven, self-controlled human who is subject to management and, on the other, the passionate human of desire and spontaneity, who threatens the predictability of life.

When we ask "What is the art in the art of innovation?" we thus open up a vast question in the history of Western thinking -- the distinction between art and science. But we do so to seek an approach to innovation that refrains from reinstalling the suffocating dichotomous order noted above. Instead, we seek to grasp innovation as a practice based upon invention. Invention is a creation. It literally means "to fabricate," to make up, by imagination, to be fabling. This is an absolutely central faculty of humans, indispensible for art and, lately, also for business. However, the emergence of the urgent need to focus business on innovation has taken place more or less as a next step in the evolution of management (knowledge and practice). But with this development, we run the risk of missing a much more fundamental and disruptive change in the way we organize and manage businesses. Innovation is not primarily a business -- it is creation/imagination/fabling. This is a human activity that corresponds not to homo oeconomicus (economic human) but to homo ludens (playing human). In their article, William Seidman and Michael McCauley address a consequence of thinking differently about innovation as they discuss the concept of the "positive deviant," as identified in an organizational context. My reading of this suggests that the "playing human" provides a much better explanatory model for such individuals than the dominant model of thinking of people in business as "economic humans."

The established order of economy and aesthetics -- assigned to different spheres of human activity (business and art), corresponding to two different times in human lives (work and leisure) and two different behavioral archetypes (Lent and Carnival) -- is breaking down. Alfred Chandler, Jr., the late Harvard Business School historian, rightfully identified the central role of management in the establishment of the competitiveness of American businesses during the era of the industrial economy.¹ This centrality might even have peaked in 1977 when he published his landmark book, whose title -- The Visible Hand -- poetically captured the function of management (in an obvious play on Adam Smith's characterization of the market as the "invisible hand").

What I propose here, though, is that the industrial economy was the basis for a certain order of running businesses, an order that included management primarily focused on efficiency, predictability, and control. The postindustrial economy is the basis for a new order. Not only is the domain of management limited, but also the business organization as such is opened to practices beyond the scope of "scientific knowledge." In Kas Kasravi's discussion of the TRIZ methodology, we find an example of this struggle to reconcile the two sides of systematicity and artistry. As Kasravi writes, "Although TRIZ can methodically provide a direction for innovation, the effective interpretation and application of that direction is very much an art." The creative business's competitiveness is based on the capacity to synthesize aesthetics and economy, art and science, senses and reason, passion and algorithm. We have left the time of "either or"; this is the era of "both and." We have more artists-in-residence than ever before. Companies employ philosophers and anthropologists. Humanities are experiencing a new growth market in the business schools (in Europe, at least). Maybe we are experiencing the dawn of the Art Firm, as Pierre Guillet de Monthoux claims.² Kalpana Sampath's contribution is written in this spirit. Her article inquires into how we can learn from the performing arts as we develop agile work environments that can act as fertile soils for innovation in organizations.

We have seen this phenomenon before, but without noticing its revolutionary potential. The 1990s was the decade of entrepreneurship, but in most cases the business organization was open to the entrepreneur only in its tamed, managed version. A century of management's preferential right of interpretation is not broken that quickly. We invented management to secure social control and economic efficiency. In the innovation-intense experience/knowledge economy of today, however, the time and place for prioritizing control is limited. Efficiency is not the winning card. The competitive game is won by businesses that know how to balance entrepreneurial and managerial modes of organizing in the innovation process. The managerial revolution in business, well described by Chandler, is over. The entrepreneurial revolution has barely started.

Understanding the art of innovation, I suggest, is a way to grasp the new business as characterized less by the behavioral genre of the industrious, and more by the genre of the assiduously imaginative. This is an "artful making," as Cutter Fellow Rob Austin and Cutter Senior Consultant Lee Devin have argued,³ where the authority is to be found in those who have learned how to master such processes. We (i.e., business) need to learn, and we need to unlearn. David Rasmussen's interesting elaboration on the jazz method of creating provides another example of artful making that is sensitive to the potential of collective creation processes. The listening is as important as the "speaking" in improvised jazz performances, and this, I believe, holds a great secret for how innovation is successfully organized.

The message of this issue is not that "work is now theatre and everyday business a stage," as Joseph Pine and James Gilmore claim in The Experience Economy.⁴ Rather, this special issue is an indication of a fundamental change in the order of economy and aesthetics as we know it historically. It radically renews the way we think of business and the role of economic rationales as guiding practices. It is a change in the relative importance of management and entrepreneurship -- in favor of the latter. It is, as Jon Marshall articulates convincingly, a challenge to the ways we think about and practice innovation. Marshall's article addresses the stalemate that results from the malign "art vs. science" dichotomy I touched on above and provides a perspective on how to breach it. In Marshall's discussion, we are moving toward the art of innovation. This is "a minor science," guided by weak rather than strong theory, running by an operative reason "inseparable from a process of trial and error, with occasional shots in the dark, guided in every case by a pragmatic sense of the situation's responsivity,"⁵ as Brian Massumi has put it. It follows that innovation is not stimulated by managerial attempts to bring it under control. For sure, there is a time for that, but we cannot start with that. Rather, as in rehearsals before a play, control needs to defer to creative processes, and entrepreneurial imagination needs instead to get to work. We now need a sense of timing to know exactly when, later in the process, management is needed. This is a new order, a new world of business. This is the art of innovation. Nancy Van Schooenderwoert rightfully invokes the metaphor of a journey when she talks about innovation processes. She also indicates that spontaneity rather than control is crucial to turning such journeys into discoveries of novelty rather than instruments for getting from point A to point B.

Improvisation, iteration, experimentation, aesthetic management, metaphysical marketing, and space for play are all prerequisites for innovative businesses. Design-intensive companies have taken the lead in integrating aesthetics as core knowledge in the way they "make business." Innovation-oriented high-tech companies develop models that secure free time for employees to do "not what they were hired to do." In what Volkswagen has described as the "century of design," the car producer is committed to selling by emotion, understanding technology and quality to be givens. Aesthetics is not only central to how a winning car is manufactured, it is also central to how it gets sold. Nokia sponsors "fashion weeks" all over the globe to emphasize its design profile. Ericsson recently opened a new Experience Center in Plano, Texas, USA, that demonstrates how the "world of wireless" holds new revenue-generating capabilities for companies and dazzling experiences for consumers. The examples are many, but the message is similar: as we are heading for a time when the so-called digital natives (i.e., those born into a digitalized world) need to be attracted to join the corporate workforce, work needs to be organized differently so as to provide space for innovation, play, improvisation, and passion.

I am happy to invite you to a reading of the interesting articles that make up this special issue. You will find that they primarily focus on new ways of approaching, thinking about, and organizing creative work. They will provide useful insight into how to facilitate innovation, including establishing agile work environments, framing the challenge of systematizing innovation, and making space for those that deviate from the norm. Together they represent a much-needed contribution to a rethinking of organized work in the postindustrial economy.

ENDNOTES

¹ Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Belknap Press, 1977.

² Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre. The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical Marketing. Stanford Business Books, 2004.

³ Austin, Rob, and Lee Devin. Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work. Financial Times/Prentice-Hall, 2003.

⁴ Pine, B. Joseph, and James H. Gilmore. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

⁵ Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.

RECOMMENDED READING

Hjorth, Daniel, and Peter Pelzer. "The Fate of Phaeton: Baroque Art for Management's Sake?" Organization, Vol. 14, No. 6, 2007, pp. 869-886.

Hjorth, Daniel. Rewriting Entrepreneurship: For a New Perspective on Organisational Creativity. Liber/Abstrakt/Copenhagen Business School Press, 2003.

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