In search of Innovation: Operating with the Future as a Working Imperative

This essay explores innovation as a socially and culturally embedded practice, coming to life in correlation between structural organizational conventions and entrepreneurial performances. With an empirical departure, it describes a rational understanding of creation, and it identifies innovation as a retrospective concept that entails a “re-development” process from the final product to the initial idea. Furthermore, it (re)locates innovation “in the (organizational) box”, and discusses the prototype as an enchanting artifact that entraps and transmits an innovative sensation. The essay concludes that innovation, although put forward as a strategic vision of a prosperous future, rather seems to serve as an inducted fundamental, a working imperative, from which employees are to manage and negotiate their everyday work. The essay emerges from ethnographic fieldwork that is consciously organized as a productive collaboration involving both applied and academic dimensions.