Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
Lilly Irani
256 pages, Princeton University Press, 2019
Can smart people, civic passion, and social investment save the world? This idea has come under fire of late with books like Winners Take All marking skepticism about the value of entrepreneurship, social innovation, and thought leadership in a world of inequality, power, and oppression. These are more than just ideas that we can rethink through dialogue, however. They are also practices born of the demand that development and democracies generate private profit, giving rise to new kinds of citizens who “add value” as much as they fulfill responsibilities or claim rights. Chasing Innovation goes deep into the design studios, social impact hubs, and development conferences where people labor under the hope that innovation and entrepreneurship might create palpable positive change. This hopeful but ultimately ineffective approach is more than a myth or ideology emanating from TED, IDEO, or Stanford. It takes hold where it poses resolutions to old postcolonial debates about the duties of the wealthy, the democratic capacities of the poor, and critiques of expert or Western knowledge. Concrete practices like design research, hackathons, applied ethnography, and reform conferences all promise to siphon bottom-up knowledge into forms that promise to create value without challenging inequality or sharing democratic control. These practices, the book shows, embody hierarchies of labor and knowledge – hierarchies older than capitalism but reshaped by the value chains in globalizing economies. This book examines these practices of hopeful world changing from Delhi, India, showing how nation building middle classes draw on their own histories of aspiration, nation building, and gendered, classed, and caste practices to navigate new governance strategies, intellectual property regimes, and investment ecologies that demand they build the nation while creating financial value. In this book, I draw on daily, immersed fieldwork in the design and development worlds around Delhi over five years. I was moved to this project in part through her own background in entrepreneurship and computer science at Stanford and work as a designer at Google. The optimism for innovation with which I began the project could not withstand the reality of the routines and social relations innovation reproduced in action. — Lilly Irani
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Film was also part of how designers restored their own faith in their projects when they felt pessimistic, disappointed, or “mindfucked.” To get mindfucked was to be drained of inspiration, frustrated by thwarted promises of getting from research to product, or disillusioned about the virtue of their work. Mindfucked designers smoked, snacked, ranted, and talked late into the night; they critiqued development officials and entrepreneurs. During one long studio work session, Kritika implored Mukta: “If I’m still doing this in five years, slap me!” Amid such feelings, designers rewatched and made new films to renew their fascination as collectors of experience and opportunity. Kritika made this explicit to me when admiring my short documentary of a woman washing the dishes in a courtyard. In the film, I had caught a woman quickly washing a staircase to prepare it as a drying rack. I had not even been sure what the moment meant, but I had caught it only on reviewing video and thought this reappropriation of form might inspire ideas for the sanitation project; Kritika gasped at the sweep of the woman’s hand, telling the rest of the team, “When we get mindfucked over, like coming up with ideas, we can just watch that again and get inspired.”
This was the representational work of constantly restoring the promise of opportunity. This promise attracted investments. This promise propelled designers and entrepreneurs to work harder. And this promise facilitated consent to systems that spoke in terms of imagined “user need” but refused to address clearly articulated needs like fluoride filtration.
At the studio, human-centered design posed empathy as inspiration, as care, and as social glue for project teams. On a broader scale, philanthropists also posed design practices as ethical remedies for the depredations of capitalism writ large. Bill and Melinda Gates addressed ambitious Stanford graduates at the 2014 commencement in the heart of Silicon Valley. The gap, they conceded, between the rich and the poor was widening. The solution, they asserted, was empathy. “If empathy channeled our optimism,” the Gateses told the audience, “we would see the poverty and the disease and the poor schools, we would answer with our innovations, and we would surprise the pessimists” (Gates and Gates 2014). The Gateses promised that empathy could bring entrepreneurial citizens in alignment with the (tacitly less entrepreneurial) poor.
The actual empathy documented in this chapter paints a different portrait of entrepreneurial alignment. In practice, empathy was not about what consumers wanted (Akrich et al. 2002, 200–201). People wanted fluoride filtration. The NGO and design team recoded that want—even need—as a “perception.” Empathy in the entrepreneurial mode sought inspiration in the texture of people’s everyday lives. Empathy in the entrepreneurial mode transformed ethical feeling into productive investments. Workshop attendees—economists, activists, company representatives—empathized when they imagined productive courses of action and risks to the success and legitimacy of their interests and roles. In short, empathy generated productive relations among entrepreneurial citizens by keeping representations of people nearby while keeping actual demands from people far away.
This entrepreneurial empathy served geopolitical goals. In Cairo in 2009, President Barack Obama launched a now-annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit focused on building “mutual interest and mutual respect” between Muslim-majority countries and the United States (Obama 2009). The Trump administration continued the practice, sending Ivanka Trump to Hyderabad, India, to speak on the power of women as entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of State described the summit’s aim as to “showcase inspiring entrepreneurs and investors from around the world creating new opportunities for investment, partnership, and collaboration.”13 The State Department had a second purpose for promoting entrepreneurship globally. Hillary Clinton’s Department of State under Obama cultivated global networks of entrepreneurs as a way of mitigating ugly feelings that could metastasize into terrorism. Bill Gates and former U.S. president Bill Clinton advocated for this new model of soft power as well. Clinton testified to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 2010: “We cannot kill, jail, or occupy all of our adversaries. We have to build a world with more partners” (United States Senate 2010, 20). Philanthropies, NGOs, and innovation champions diffused pedagogies of entrepreneurship through conferences, workbooks and toolkits, and funded projects and competitions. Human-centered design was one of the key pedagogies; it taught would-be entrepreneurs to observe and listen to others, translate lives into sites of opportunity, and optimistically find the “mutual interest” that could become the vein of viable opportunity.
The entrepreneurial ethos is also micropolitical. Human-centered design offers entrepreneurs a way of engineering and marketing change while managing resistance and “perceptions.” Management practitioners have, for decades, employed empathy as a skill of “soft capitalism” (Thrift 1997)—the skill of managing individuals without resorting to violence, coercion, or bureaucratic authority. HCD channels these skills both into the designed form of objects and into the institutional organization of development. These projects conjoin the production of social order and the production of financial value; all the while, they work to ensure that project targets and subjects feel creative, participatory, and free.
Poor people, Melinda Gates told Wired in 2013, have “ingenious ideas about what would really help them.” But entrepreneurial innovators need more than ideas—even ones that come from poor people. They have to translate the interests of investors, manufacturers, and powerful institutions into forms desirable and acceptable to potential users. This is a far cry from shared control. 14 This empathy for potential users does not imply responsibility to the other. It is an empathy that treats others’ lives as inspiration, expanding how companies, NGOs, and entrepreneurs see their own interests and scopes of action. It is an empathy that seeks to entice unruly users to behaviors preferred by development agencies and manufacturers. It is an empathy that seeks to work along with some habits and transform others. It is an empathy in service of the conjoined tasks of market development (Cross 2013; Elyachar 2012a) and development governmentality (Li 2007; Scott 2006; Foucault 1991).
To understand the politics of empathy as a technique for regulating entrepreneurial citizens’ powers to affect, we might compare these practices of mass empathy to a different political ethic. Feminist philosopher of science Donna Haraway (2008) argues that the work of political collaboration across difference requires the forging of relationships among beings—animals, humans, and other lively subjects. The design team might not have known about fluorosis, but once they learned about it, what responsibility did they have to respond to the people they spent days interviewing when those people said they need fluoride water filters? Design, we saw, did not imply responsibility or accountability to such calls. The intersecting patterns of design work, global health work, and mass production and distribution made the ability to respond—what Haraway calls response-ability (71)—unimaginable at worst and unviable at best. Neither I nor the designers on the team discussed how we might exceed the client’s directions to collaborate with fluorosis activists in the region. Our professional habitus occluded the possibility. My absence of imagination in that moment haunts me and this book.
Instead of holding themselves responsible to others, innovators moved their conceptions of the other into the studio and into expert workshops. At a distance, innovators could render others’ lives as “inspiration”—as a source of excitement, redolent detail, and novel lines of flight. As inspiration, these socially dissimilar others could not threaten the creative energies of experts in vibrant inspiration and innovative fantasy. These others could not question the priorities and sensibilities that excited the producers. Empathy was not an understanding of the other. It was the feeling of understanding the other—a feeling more stable as a memory rather than as the reality of the lives of others. What a foundation officer from the United States with a resume spanning work in Africa and Asia can empathize with is limited by what she can imagine from her own experiences and what her grantees will labor to teach her. She comes from a world that enshrines European and American individuated dignity, privacy, and self-possession as universal human values. Designers too are limited by their classed and casted histories, even as they are hired on as empathic mediators. The studio and the workshop were far away from those places where targets of development could call inspiration into question or to account.
Entrepreneurial citizenship—here mobilized through human-centered design—stimulates and shapes the affects of those called into its productive, futuristic circuits—its affective economies (Ahmed 2004). Sara Ahmed conceptualizes affective economies to point out how feelings emerge in interactions conditioned by history. Affects, for Ahmed, are capacities of relating among people that do not originate in subjects—they take shape in histories, media, and reactions to environments and things—but form subjects in the interaction. The empathy DevDesign facilitated—through “the heart-wrenching potty video,” for example—rode on myriad histories of social relations. It fed on the developmental desires of middle-class Indians. It fed on NGO workers’ sense of duty as activists. It fed on nationalist histories that told of educated elites—lawyers, engineers, social workers—serving India’s villages. It fed on frustrations with state and corporate corruption that make entrepreneurialism feel like a form of restorative direct action.
Entrepreneurial calls to citizenship seem open-ended, allowing them to feed on these diverse hopes and histories. While the open-endedness of these agendas makes them seem open to reformulation, feedback, meetings, and workshops bring designers and project participants’ hopes back into line with the larger foundation-funded projects. The affects put to work here are historically and culturally mediated (Mazzarella 2009, 2004; Ahmed 2004). A variety of desires, hopes, and forms of mobility can, through HCD and social entrepreneurship, be subsumed into the kinds of research practices that grease the wheels of development with even more intimate knowledge and integration with existing social relations. Concepts that claim universality like development, like capitalism, encounter friction everywhere they try to root (Tsing 2005). Design research offers entrepreneurial citizens a set of techniques for attempting to reduce this friction, or even turn friction into inspiration and the multiplication of opportunity. What differentiates mere perception from opportunity are the interests, capacities, and tolerances of those with accumulated resources to invest to steer the directions of development.