FRUITFUL INSTABILITY · The Cultural Logic of Creative Practice in Israeli High-Technology Start-Ups
FP7 — People (Marie Curie Actions)
- Duration
- 2011-09-01 → 2015-08-31
- EU contribution
- €100,000
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MC-CIG
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Fruitful Instability: The Cultural Logic of Creative Practice in Israeli High-Technology Start-Ups
This project is an ethnographic study of creative practice in the high-technology and information economy sector, primarily in Israel, a sector that has been exceptionally productive compared to similar sectors in other regions in the world. Based on a longitudinal and multi-sited ethnographic study in a number of institutional sites of routinized business innovation, the project’s goal is to provide a detailed account of some of the cultural and structural determinants of high-technology innovation. Theoretically, the project advances insights into an emerging area of interest in organizational theory, namely an interest in flexible organizational models that are conducive to innovation. Additionally, the idea of routinized business innovation, which the project develops, provides an opportunity to rethink the culturally salient dichotomy between modern normative ideals of rationality and modern normative ideals of creativity. The project suggests that an ethnographic account of strategies of routinized business innovation developed by business innovation consultancy groups provides an opportunity to challenge this dichotomy. Beyond this theoretical level, the project is timely in light of the agreement among academics and policy-makers as to the increasing importance of high-technology products and expert knowledge as generators of wealth in the contemporary moment. Since the beginning of the project, ethnographic research has been conducted in a number of institutional sites of business innovation in the high-technology sector and the creative industries. During this fieldwork data have been collected on the actual practices of business innovation consultants vis-à-vis specific innovation projects, as well as on attempts to automate and streamline creative and innovative business practices in the organizational sector. The research has identified a number of strategies of routinized business innovation, which have been theorized in a number of articles and book chapters using semiotic anthropological theories, political economy, and strands of research from the sociology and anthropology of knowledge. The research has clarified the nuts and bolts of the ideation phase of number of strategies of routinized business innovation, and has demonstrated that these strategies effectively reconcile rationalization and creative practice. Some of the data collected during the research are still being analyzed and will form the basis for future publications. The research will eventually culminate in a monograph on routinized business innovation, which is likely to inform the practices of business innovation consultants, entrepreneurs, and policy-makers, as well as anthropological theories of cultural creativity and innovation.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Israel, a country of only 7.7 million people, has the highest density of start-ups in the world (1 for every 1844 Israelis). Furthermore, more Israeli companies are listed on the NASDAQ exchange than all companies from the entire European continent. In addition, in 2008, per capita venture capital investments in Israel were 2.5 times greater than in the U.S., and more than 30 times greater than in Europe. This productivity takes place in one of the most unstable geopolitical regions in the world. This is a paradox given the fact that organizational theory and common sense suggest the importance of a stable geopolitical environment for successful market and business functionality, especially in the start-up industry that is by itself characterized by high levels of financial risk.This research will rely on ethnographic fieldwork and participant observation in two Israeli high-technology start-ups and the Israeli start-up sector in order to account for the cultural logic that explains this paradox. The research hypothesis is that Israel’s unstable geopolitical reality has a number of productive features that are commensurate with some of the specific features of successful start-ups. I will study this productive relationship at three different levels: 1) the commensurability between the cognitive and procedural orientations former Israeli Defense Forces-trained high-tech people acquire during their military service and the cognitive and procedural orientations mobilized in much of the research and development in successful Israeli start-ups; 2) culturally-specific interactional norms among Israeli start-up employees that are the product of Israel’s conflictual history and that are conducive to flexible organizational decision-making; and 3) the commensurability between the risk-intensive Israeli culture and the cultural framework needed for the risk-intensive transformation of innovative ideas into marketable products through the recruitment of venture capital.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM · JerusalemCoordinatorIsrael
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union