Interrogating Innovation

[in order of presentation]

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Payal Arora 

Do the next billion users need more innovation? Rethinking AI for the common good

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The 21st century is marketed as the age of innovation. Sir John Chisholm, an expert on change management, declares that technology will change “the very future of the human race.” Ryan Allis - an angel investor in 25 companies including SpaceX, Elon Musk’s Mars project— provides a startup guide to ease us into this new era. All we need to do is reimagine “everything,” says Allis. With just “a laptop, a smartphone, and the cloud,” we can access any service anytime. While traditional institutions such as the educational system in low- income countries is regarded as a “stunning market failure” according to the likes of Matt Keller, former Director of the Global Learning XPRIZE, the market “success” of new technology  will step in and take its place. Smart technology will replace not-so-smart people. Humans, it seems, have become obstacles to their own betterment. Technology entrepreneurs today are busy making all- inclusive, self- contained autonomous apps for the next billion users –majority of whom are outside the West and live in countries with less liberal institutions. Centralized reform is being discarded for personalized solutionism. Automation of self-help is the foundation of the innovation age. This talk will argue against this popular narrative and bring to question this laboratory approach of using the next billion users as the guinea pigs for social progress – and why we have become more forgiving of technological failure than of human failure.

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Itty Abraham &

Onat Kibaroglu

Innovation as a Boundary Condition

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A conventional genealogy of “innovation” begins from Schumpeter, runs through neoclassical economics (among others, Solow 1957; Krugman 1979), and emerges, shiny and polished, in the 21st century’s irrational exuberance over startups, unicorns and other mythical beasts.  Seen from the Global South, however, innovation has a parallel genealogy, which begins from global structural inequality. Underdevelopment emerges in the work of Prebisch, Frank, Sunkel and others as a constituent outcome of the technological superiority of the Global North.  The idea of innovation, produced through metaphors of impediment and mimicry as technological limits, now becomes a boundary condition.  Innovation separates North from South; in its commonsense version, the need to overcome this limit is elevated to the obvious and necessary as the contemporary “measure of man” (Adas, 1990).  How and when local innovation becomes the rallying cry for Southern states is a story of national incorporation into dominant global narratives of achievement and progress (not resistance to it).  The other side of that incorporation might be called, following Ackbar Abbas, a form of “poor theory”: the invisibility of local innovations, humble yet effective, socially responsive and indigenously developed, which may yet open up meanings of “the technological society” when given their due.  This paper will explore these assertions through eclectic and disjointed discussions of Indonesia, Turkey and India. 

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Taylor Coplen 

Decentralized Hardware Production: Makerspaces, Shanzhai, and the Future of Shenzhen’s Technology Industries

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Producing hardware has become cheaper, faster, and easier. Technological advancements have resulted in the development of widely-available, powerful hardware components that allow individuals to create novel products. This technological change has resulted in two distinct communities who seek to take advantage of its potential: the international maker movement and Shenzhen’s shanzhai production networks. The maker movement developed from a group of amateur technology enthusiasts in Western Europe and North America, who aimed to create new forms of technology from open source components. Similarly, shanzhai production networks developed in China’s Pearl River Delta and used the tools of open source hardware to produce cheap alternatives to popular electronic products.

This analysis will argue that the maker movement seeks to shift the means of production from traditional firms to individuals, while the shanzhai production networks lower socioeconomic barriers to technological production. Moreover, shanzhai production networks lower the barrier of technology expertise by establishing a cooperative community in which an individual with an innovative idea can connect with collaborators who possess the requisite technological expertise to bring it to fruition. As a result, both communities constitute distinct ways in which technological production is undergoing a process of democratization.

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David Li

Grassroots Open Innovation: A Shenzhen narrative

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The city of Shenzhen in southern China is being called “Silicon Valley of Hardware” and recognized as the most important innovation hub in China. The city went through a tremendous transformation in the past four decades going from a collection of fifteen fishing villages of 300,000 people to a modern metropolitan producing 90% of global electronic/ICT products. Moreover, the city came into the global limelight as the sweatshops with suicidal workers in iPhone factories in 2010. In China, the city was known as the Zhaidu (寨都), the capital of Shanzhai, the knockoff copycat production.

This talk presents that the rapid transformation of Shenzhen to a global innovation hub is the result of its grassroots open innovation ecosystem that commoditizes the technologies and empowers mass innovation and entrepreneurship through low IP barrier technology diffusion. The open innovation ecosystem of Shenzhen presents an alternative narrative to the IP heavy techno-solutionism narrative of innovation today. The Shenzhen approach centers around mass empowerment and collaboration of people with open and commoditized access to the technologies and the production of information and communication technology objects.

The Shenzhen bottom-up open innovation ecosystem is increasingly become important for the next innovators and entrepreneurs, especially in the emerging economies. The ecosystem is more inclusive since it supports real impacts rather than novel ideas regardless of the background of the innovators.

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Emily Chua

Startup as a way of being

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This paper looks at startup founders in Singapore as individuals who are engaged not only in making innovative businesses, but also in making themselves – cultivating habits and dispositions, building up networks of personal relationships and fashioning individual identities, around the idea of innovative enterprise. I look at how innovative entrepreneurship is being promoted by the Singapore government, and undertaken by many people here, not merely as a way of making a living, but as a more all-encompassing way of being in today’s world. Many current, former and aspiring startup founders in Singapore speak at, attend and connect to one another through events that are organized around themes such as entrepreneurship as a lifestyle, strategies for funding oneself, attitudes towards failure and techniques for managing stress. As participants in such events, and as members of the broader “startup ecosystem” in which they take place, founders do not only work on building their products and businesses; but also on building themselves into individuals who have the right social instincts, cultural resources, personal habits and even philosophical convictions, for thriving in an age of globally mobile capital and its attendant uncertainties. I explore the practices and processes of self-formation that such individuals are engaged in, to consider how state-initiated efforts to promote innovation in Singapore are contributing to the emergence of new forms of social and cultural life.

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Lina Dencik

Innovation and the Disruption of Justice

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The drive to turn vast amounts of activity and human behaviour into data points that can be tracked, collected and analysed has become a significant feature of contemporary social life; what has been described as the ‘datafication’ of society. With these developments we are confronted with a significant shift in governance and a fundamental transformation of state-corporate-citizen relations. Whilst this is often hailed as ‘revolutionary’ in its potential for enhanced efficiency, security and innovation, we have also seen an increasing concern with the societal implications of these developments. In particular, a growing body of research has pointed to the multiple ways in which datafication both introduces and entrenches key questions pertaining to a broader concern with social justice, such as issues of inequality, discrimination, and exclusion. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s concept of ‘abnormal justice’, I sketch how datafication intersects different nodes of abnormality: 1) the ‘what’ of justice (the ontology); 2) the ‘who’ of justice (the scope); and 3) the ‘how’ of justice (the procedure). How datafication, in other words, disrupts the very grammar of justice (noting, as does Fraser, that abnormality has tended to be the rule rather than the exception in worldly state of affairs). Disruption here is dual -- both with regards to justice in general as well as the particularities of justice in relation to data – and points to the way data processes are part of long-standing struggles that have often been side-lined or ignored in justice debates.

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Mahmud Farooque

Innovating with the Public—One deliberation at a time

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Responding to the growing mistrust of the institution of science as a means of contributing to personal, social and economic well-being, an increasing number of scientific advisory bodies have been issuing a variety of calls for upstream and sustained engagements with diverse stakeholders and the general public. Unfortunately, beyond few disparate examples and despite abundance of methodological choices and options, stakeholder and public engagement for decision-making in the upstream remains at its infancy and struggling to garner sustained institutional commitment and stable financial support.

This talk will focus on the rationale, development, and operationalization of the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST), a distributed institutional network launched in 2010 in response to the growing gap between science and the public and in recognition of the difficulties of innovating in political crisis driven institutions. It brings together academic research, informal science education, and non-partisan policy analysis to engage citizens on decision-making about science and technology. After its first demonstration project on biodiversity in 2012, ECAST has been successful in securing funding for multi-site public engagements on issues of Planetary Defense (NASA), Nuclear Waste (DOE), Climate and Energy (UNFCCC), Community Resilience (NOAA), and Solar Geoengineering (Sloan).

ECAST’s latest project, “Navigating our shared driverless futures” is an international collaboration with France’s Missions Publiques to bring together the voices of lay citizens in public forums in cities across North America, Europe, and Asia. The project’s principal aims also include helping local level decision-making. The day-long deliberations interrogate hundreds of representatively diverse participants about their present-day mobility challenges, trust and confidence in automated systems, preferred scenarios for development, and governance of issues such as access, equity, privacy, security and liability.  Built on past learning, the project provides important insights about emerging opportunities for innovating with the public and the challenges that remain.

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Roylien Hoyng

Cybernetics and Liminality: Positioning the Critique of Innovation

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Whether celebrated or feared, we often hear of a supposedly imminent world of smart cities producing relentless data streams, things “talking” to one another from supply chains to fridges, and ubiquitous surveillance not just registering our cheekbones but even our gaits or heartbeats. Instead of presuming the ubiquity and omniscience of datafication and cybernetic control, I want to highlight the continuous presence of liminality in today’s datafied world. Supposedly, recursive feedback loops function to combat liminality, contingency, and difference not by eliminating or ignoring it, but by integrating it. Yet what are the sites of excess, illegibility, accident, and resistance to the cybernetic control? In this presentation, I distinguish between cybernetics’ encounter with non-digital liminality, on the one hand, and its engendering of post-digital liminality, on the other. One obvious way to understand non-digital liminality would be as what resists datafication and resides in the interstices of digital-infrastructural networks or beyond the purview of data-centric gazes. We might repurpose the notion of subalternity from postcolonial critique to consider such instances. Post-digital liminality is perhaps harder to place but can be understood as the undecidability, incomputability, and speculative element within cybernetic computation itself. This presentation provides examples of both forms of liminality by referring to smart urbanisms as well as logistical media. My aim is to understand their consequences and political purchase from a situated perspective that considers cybernetics as part of concrete contexts of practice. My presentation furthermore raises questions about the positionality of the critical scholar of cybernetics. Do we too easily identify with the cybernetic gaze and, if so, at what cost? How do we design our research around liminality instead?

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Cameron Tonkinwise

Transitioning is a Practice-based Designing not a Need-driven Innovation

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Clichés (that are also sexist) like ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ persist when innovation presumes that humans are, more or less universally, sets of fixed needs for which there are infinite variety of value capturable ‘solutions.’ ‘Design Thinking’ has at least the merit of directing would-be innovators toward primary research, to discover people’s ‘pain points’ and ‘jobs to be done.’ However, because these ‘empathetic’ ‘dives’ or ‘spikes’ must be done hastily (as part of Lean Agile product development), they tend to be structured by theoretical frameworks such as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Following Jean Baudrillard’s call (1972) for a deconstruction of the discourse of needs underlying design-driven innovation, this presentation will explore the ways in which Manfred Max-Neef’s alternate account (1986) of needs should in fact direct designers toward situated ‘social practices.’ These constellations of things, skills, and meanings, held together by affective judgements about when the practice has been performed well reorient the focus from exnovational (Sandeep 1996) kinds of innovation to engagements aimed more at diffusing innovations or, more accurately, trying to influence the evolution of social practices. This new approach to ‘social innovation’ which could be called Transition Design, avoids ‘value capturing’ unnovations (Haque 2009), and so is a fitting perspective for cultural diverse societies needing to begin processes of degrowth.

Shobita Parthasarathy 

The Politics of Innovation in International Development: The Case of Menstrual Hygiene Management in India

The international development landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, with growing excitement about the power of innovation to improve the lives of the poor. Both traditional development agencies and new social venture funds, social entrepreneurs and incubators, and philanthrocapitalist initiatives emphasize the transformative potential of new and evidence-based technologies, processes, and ideas that are scalable, often commodifiable, and can be implemented quickly. Innovation, these proponents argue, is an antidote to the problems of past development interventions, by using both scientific knowledge and market insights to be both nimble and democratic. But what are the political implications of bringing Western innovation ideology to international development? And what does democracy mean in these contexts? Focusing on menstrual hygiene management (MHM) in India, in this talk I argue that innovative interventions for development are establishing and reinforcing the legitimacy of science and market institutions for eliciting and interpreting the voices of the marginalized in Southern countries. And yet at the same time, like previous methods for hearing the subaltern, these institutions are constructing citizens and their voices in particular ways. In the case of MHM, girls and women are seen asproto-citizens who are ignorant and primitive, reliant on both MHM interventions in order to empower themselves and realize their full economic and political potential. In the process, traditional and indigenous knowledge and innovation go unvalued and even denigrated.  

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Anju Mary Paul 

Tentative title:  Scientific Cultures on the Move: The Scientific Remittances of Returning Western-trained Asian Scientists 

What do returning Asian academic scientists who previously trained and worked in the West bring back with them when they return to work in Asian universities and research institutes? Using data drawn from 119 in-depth interviews with elite Asian scientists in China, India, Singapore, Taiwan and the United States, I describe the scientific cultures that these scientists were exposed to when they first moved to the West for training. I identify seven key dimensions of difference that interviewees self-reported in their accounts of the scientific cultures they were exposed to in the West vis-à-vis what they had been exposed to when they first trained in Asia: (1) the approach to learning, (2) the approach to problem solving, (3) the priorities for administrative work processes, (4) the scope of research ambitions, (5) the degree of autonomy that individual scientists were given and expected to have as they pursued their research, (6) the level of importance given to rank and seniority in the workplace, and finally (7) institutional attitudes towards difference. For those scientists who chose to return, this exposure to a new scientific culture shaped what I call the “scientific remittances” they brought back with them. I end by discussing how these norms and value-based kinds of scientific remittances do not always align with the intentions of national-level governments when they try to lure Asian scientists to return to Asia and bring back scientific knowhow, reputational standing, and network connections with them.

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