Sandbox Innovation: Potentials and Impacts

Abstract

We introduce this collection on "sandbox innovation," where innovative practices are separated and nurtured within a confined, risk-controlled environment, akin to a child’s sandbox. Originating in software development as a protective mechanism for experimental tasks, the sandbox concept has expanded to the entrepreneurial realm, offering a "safe space" for experimenting with new ideas. While such frameworks, including hackathons and incubator programs, foster creativity without the hindrances of real-world complexities, they also raise critical questions about the real-world applicability and responsibilities of innovations once they exit these controlled environments. This paper further explores the anthropology of entrepreneurship, revealing how sandboxing has become both an explicit and implicit practice within innovation ecosystems. Drawing upon various perspectives, the research calls for a deeper examination of the sandbox’s boundaries, emphasizing the need for ongoing, responsive innovation that takes into account the ever-evolving intricacies of social life and the broader responsibilities of real-world impact.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY

There’s a growing trend in innovation scenes of using "sandboxes"—safe spaces where ideas can be explored without the complications of real-world challenges. These sandboxes, like hackathons and workshops, provide a playground for innovators to experiment freely. However, as these innovations leave the sandbox for the real world, they face complexities and responsibilities that were shielded within the confined space. In this article, we introduce this collection, which delves into the concept of sandboxing and its impact on entrepreneurial practices. First, we contextualize sandboxes as one technology of innovation, similar to post-it notes, pitches, and prototypes. These common technologies of innovation influence how people practice innovation and thus how they think about it. We argue that while these sandboxes can be crucially liberating when explicitly practiced, they can also limit responsiveness to social life when left implicit. Lora, studying a German makeathon, discusses the explicit use of sandboxes to encourage risk-taking in a controlled environment. Meanwhile, Angela describes how Stockholm’s innovation ecosystem unintentionally hinders entrepreneurs from addressing how their innovations interact with real-world social issues by implicitly encompassing entrepreneurship in an ecosystem-wide sandbox. The clash between the confined sandbox and the unbounded reality of entrepreneurship sparks a crucial question: How can we responsibly navigate the impact of innovations beyond the sandbox? The collection highlights the need to dismantle implicit sandboxes, promoting ongoing collaboration and responsiveness to emerging outcomes. It questions the role of sandboxes in shaping our perception of innovation and calls for a deeper understanding of their influence.

Keywords:

• Innovation
• entrepreneurship
• sandbox

Introduction

The concept of innovation is becoming increasingly ubiquitous as it has been adopted as a framework across domains ranging from public policy to private industry to higher education and research. Along the way, it is becoming increasingly difficult to define what the concept actually means while an increasing amount of humanity’s hopes and ambitions for anticipated futures are being projected onto it. This rise emerged in tandem with the growth and spread of neoliberalism that disarticulated entrepreneurship’s values and practices in order to spread them across social, professional, and economic life. We now speak of entrepreneurial lives (Lemke 2001), entrepreneurial selves (Bröckling 2015; Bührmann 2005), and entrepreneurial citizenship (Irani 2019) to the extent that “everyone, it seems, is an entrepreneur these days” (Pozen 2008, 283). These twin trends have together captured ambitions, enchanted imaginations, and diverted innovators toward explicit and implicit entrepreneurial practices and values.

In this collection, we explore one such entrepreneurial practice, innovation sandboxing—that is, to separate innovation practices into a safe, confined “play” space like a playground sandbox. Once moved outside the sandbox through a launch, release, or publication, innovation must contend with all the complexities of social life that cannot be wholly predicted or accounted for. Innovators, such as the entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers that appear in this collection, often find these complexities unsafe and damaging to innovation, leading to the rise of sandboxes to protect and nurture it.

Sandbox frameworks, like hackathons, ideation workshops, incubator programs, intrapreneur programs, and other sequestered innovation, design, and development practices are useful—and perhaps even necessary—for the imaginative freedom they facilitate when one is not burdened with the complexity of social life. Yet, the growing popularity of these practices and the hype that surrounds them, have not typically left space to be reflexive about the impacts of their outcomes. How do we imagine, respond to, and take responsibility for the impact of innovations, once they find themselves outside their sandbox walls? In this collection, we reflect on the nature of sandboxes and how and if they can be altered to become responsive to out-of-sandbox realities and responsibilities (Figure 1).

Figure 1. This playful robot welcomes members of this Stockholm-based “open platform for innovation” with “Hello human! Blip your blip on the blipper please.”

Pitches, Post-Its, Prototypes…and Sandboxes: The Anthropology in and of Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Scholarly anthropological interest in entrepreneurship and innovation came in two waves. The first wave of interest, from the 1950s to 1970s, focused on culture change and disrupting dominant theories’ focus on equilibrium and inattention to individuals. Aligned with economists such as Joseph Schumpeter who described innovation as a “gale of creative destruction” (Schumpeter 1976, 84), this literature portrayed entrepreneurs as disruptive innovators in society (Stewart 1992). Early entries into this literature took up concerns of who initiates cultural change—risk-taking, profit seeking leaders (Barth 1963), prestigious innovators who others sought to imitate (Linton 1936), maladjusted, frustrated and outcast tinkerers (Barnett 1941), or both (Adams 1951)—and introduced the “Entrepreneur as Rebel Against Traditional Society” (Hagen 1960), as the prototypical example of a change agent (Parsons 1961), and as broker across communities, difference, and scale (Flores-Meiser 1978; Geertz 1960; Wolf 1956). The second wave of interest began in the late 1980s and has been growing since the early 1990s, driven by the intertwining of entrepreneurship with the rise of neoliberalism primarily toward the critique of entrepreneurial values and practices as they’ve been applied across society (Bröckling 2015; Bührmann 2005; Lemke 2001).

An anthropology of entrepreneurship that focuses on documenting entrepreneurship itself rather than as a proxy for culture change or neoliberal critique is a late development in the field of anthropology. Although it has always existed within the scope of economic anthropology, hiding between the lines and timidly present in the margins, the lion’s share of attention has regularly been focused on topics such as markets; informal economies, and corruption; the anthropology of work and labor relations; the production, reproduction, and circulation of goods; and the role of power in the structuring and proliferation of capitalist practices, often formulated as a robust critique of neoliberalism. Not all of these works engage specifically with innovation, or with being entrepreneurial or otherwise enterprising. Many others directly address forms, practices, and cultural dimensions of entrepreneurship. They unpack how entrepreneurial practices are enmeshed with local culturally embedded and actively reconfigured ideas of careerism, informal labor and markets, flexibility, and even spirituality, in contexts as varied as the post-Soviet sphere (Fomina 2020; Hemment 2015; e.g., Volkov 2016; Yurchak 2003), contemporary China (e.g., Lindtner 2020), and India (e.g., Irani 2019). Similarly, these literatures attend to the role of kinship and family ties, roles, structures, and culture on economic activities, such as family firms and entrepreneurialism (Koellner 2022; Stewart 2010; Wong and Chau 2019; e.g., Yanagisako 2002, 2019).

Now and in recent years a growing number of scholars and practitioners focus on the topic of entrepreneurship and innovation which, as Briody and Stewart (2019) point out, can be a fruitful domain for anthropology (see also Pfeilstetter 2021). Work from India (Ghosh 2020; Irani 2019) to South Africa (Beresford 2020) and the Gulf (Steiner 2020) offers a compelling initial picture on the various cultural contexts through which entrepreneurial activities refract. Marshall (2018) documented how entrepreneurship can be used by NGOs as a “rehabilitative tool” for marginalized and vulnerable populations, such as ex-prisoners seeking to rebuild their lives. Kelman (2018) demonstrated how entrepreneurship creates conflicting institutional logics of affirmative action and independent economic merit. Ning (2023) explored moral and ethical dilemmas created by entrepreneurship. Vertovec (2021) found that entrepreneurship even acted as a political act of resistance against state restrictive politics. A more robust attention to entrepreneurship allows anthropology to theorize and push forward anthropological theories of capital, labor and economic relations, forms of work, and structures of inventions and bureaucracy. It has additionally offered a window of inquiry into how innovation—as a set of practices and a phenomenon largely seen as the engine of contemporary venture creation and development—is embroiled into the logic and realities of entrepreneurship, and what the social, linguistic, and cultural logics are in how innovation unfolds. Although still underdeveloped, the anthropology of innovation has also been gathering speed. In Chasing Innovation, Irani (2019) explores how the ideas and actions related to starting new businesses, seen as a way for India to progress, shape the way people think about being a citizen and an individual. This is in contrast to the challenges posed by traditional customs, social systems, and the economic, political, and cultural factors that make overcoming poverty difficult. Similarly, Lindtner (2020) has carefully documented how China has created its own national model of innovation and entrepreneurship, one which increasingly resists the dominant Silicon Valley model of venturing and new business creation.

Across innovation scenes, regardless of cultural or national contexts, props of innovation nearly ubiquitously appear, including the pitch, the post-it note, and the prototype. Inspired by Sneath’s et al. “technologies of imaginations,” we might call these technologies of innovation—“the social and material means by which particular imaginings are generated” (Sneath, Holbraad, and Pedersen 2009, 6). All three have been attracting increasing attention as cultural artifacts that stand for innovation-enabling devices. This research has been primarily critical of these technologies of innovation for how they often promote specific modes of neoliberal capitalist practices and the Silicon Valley way of creating novelty.

For example, such a critical intellectual posture towards the Silicon Valley model is prominent in recent work around the question of the entrepreneurial pitch as a “market-shaping instrument” reliant on “performative value creation” (Fairbairn, Kish, and Guthman 2022, 666)—a genre indelible from innovation and entrepreneurship. Angela has proposed that we see it as a “tactic for telling stories that enroll(s) allies in one’s ambition and projects” (see also 2021, 2022, 50), while Perez (2021) has examined the entrepreneurial pitch as indicative of the moral and ethical underpinnings of speculative capitalist practices in Silicon Valley. Similarly critical has been the approach towards the post-it note—in its ubiquity in this sphere—shown to be a key semiotic technology enabling post-Fordist neoliberal flexible accumulation (Wilf 2016), even if it has also been theorized in a more positive vein as a technology helping equalize otherwise difficult to navigate corporate innovation hierarchies (Rakova and Fedorenko 2021).

Finally, of all these technologies, the prototype has been the one perhaps most discussed and most coopted by anthropology for its own purposes. An open-ended, preliminary, co-constructed phenomenon, the prototype is a compelling artifact of innovation in both material terms and as a metaphor and perhaps even an emblem for innovation as a practice. Thus, the prototype can be a material object with both a discovery and an interventional potential: “an artifact with particular performative characteristics within the work of new technology design (representing) a strategy for uncovering user needs, taken as already existing but somehow latent, unarticulated, or even unrecognized by practitioners themselves” (Suchman 2011, 8). The prototype can also be an integral component of scientific knowledge production. In that it is partially complete and always co-constructed, the prototype has also become a surprising, if very fruitful, heuristic for ethnographic knowledge production in that it shares similar characteristics with ethnographic work: deeply interactional and open to probing, always partially incomplete, always collaboratively co-constructed and, if done right, ending with a better question and a suggestion for a next iteration (e.g., Corsín Jiménez 2014; Corsín Jiménez and Estalella 2017; Estalella 2016) (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The art and innovation studio inside a Stockholm-based co-working space. Art supplies were available to all members for inspiration, prototyping, and creative outlet.

Yet for those working in innovation and entrepreneurship, whether as academic anthropologists researching it as a domain of social and economic life, or as applied anthropologists working together with UX researchers and designer, engineers, and business professionals, one entrepreneurial artifact has been under-attended to: that of the sandbox. Playground sandboxes are sand-filled play areas with distinct walls that contain the messiness of play to protect both a child at play from her environment and to protect the wider environment from the child’s play. In much the same way, computer science and software development adopted the concept to describe “an encapsulation mechanism that is used to impose a security policy on software components” (Maass et al. 2016, 5) useful for testing, experimentation, and creation that is enforced by policies that both protected the work from its environment and the environment from the work. In entrepreneurship, sandboxes and sandboxing have been adopted to explicitly and implicitly describe the policy, infrastructural, and social mechanisms and practices that encapsulate the work of entrepreneurs away from social life beyond the venture. It is to its promises and perils; potentials and impact; limitations and possibilities, as well as to the many aspects the sandbox as an artifact of innovation lends itself to the anthropologically-informed scrutiny and discussion that this collection is dedicated to.

We converged on the topic of sandboxes following the peculiar resonances the sandbox had in the life of the ethnographies both of us were conducting. In best ethnographic tradition, the sandbox beckoned us, rather than us seeking it out as a topic. Both of us arrived at the topic of sandboxes in innovation via our respective work in entrepreneurial ecosystems in Europe at around roughly the same time period. Angela was conducting an ethnography of Stockholm’s innovation ecosystem from 2017 to 2018 and online during the pandemic. Meanwhile Lora was researching academic venturing in the German context, pursuing two separate projects: one on makeathons and hackathons and one on research-based moonshot innovation. Given that a large portion of the innovation paradigms, books, trend-setters, practices and broader ideologies in innovation diffuse from their original epicenter in the United States (typically Silicon Valley), at first there was no surprise that the language and ideas which both of us encountered in their respective fieldwork resonated with one another. In both locations, pitch competitions drew on hyping practices, there was giddiness in the air, people used lean methodologies and relied on business model canvases, and spoke of unicorns, to name only a few. Both of us were immersed in a world of prototypes, platform talk, techies and business students, and innovation coaches and innovation frameworks.

The sandbox—as a set of practices adopted by nascent and early-stage entrepreneurs, therefore—emerged quickly as a form indelible to the way innovation was practiced in both locations. Yet the way it was invoked in our respective ethnographic materials was in a fairly contrastive, paradoxical manner.

Explicit and Implicit Sandboxed Innovation

In 2018 Lora was conducting ethnography of a German makeathon. “I want to help make Germans more risk-loving. For them to get out of the zone of control,” one of the initiators and co-founders of the makeathon explained, providing the common rationale for sandboxes in this context. A doctoral student in a high-tech field at the time, and a co-founder of several ventures, one of the frustrations he often voiced with the university entrepreneurial ecosystem he was back then immersed in was that it was too tame. There was not enough risk, not enough daring, not enough actual entrepreneurship for his taste. In many ways, this was seen as a factor both of the popular, and not necessarily unfounded, stereotype of the risk-aversion of Germans, and of the fact that within the university context of venturing, the motivations, resources and realities of founding a business were often conflicting, largely based in divergent logic but concurrently present cultural practices (Koycheva 2022). The makeathon, he mused, was meant to give them a taste of how entrepreneurship could look: messy, exhausting, full of hope, adrenaline, and above all uncertainty of outcome—a daily rollercoaster of sorts where not much exists outside of the pursuit of your venture idea and building the right solution. He hoped this “taster” would inspire a longer-lasting appetite to continue to try and engage with building ventures in the world outside of the university. “The whole thing is a sandbox,” he said. “Look it up. They can f—up, without real damage but still learn from it.”

As an engineer with a background in software, he was referring to a popular device in software development where engineers experiment and test novel components without jeopardizing an already operative system (e.g., Maass et al. 2016). In his logic, in order to encourage more risk-embracing behavior, he felt the need to provide a safe enough environment where people could be exposed to risk without being exposed to real risk and consequences: otherwise, they would continue to reject risky behavior on an a priori ground. The sandbox, in this view, was a way to scale down and lessen the degree of consequences, all the while enabling their existence for experiential and experimental purposes. In the sandbox, participants could learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurial frameworks and practices, such as rapid prototyping, minimum viable product validation, customer acquisition, pitching and navigating the vagaries of multidisciplinary teams and founder relationships, all the while testing whether they were entrepreneur material. Lora theorized this process—enabled by the playfulness of the sandbox—as an “as if” process of identity formation through speculative practice, part and parcel of a long chain of decision making whether a student or a researcher would pursue an entrepreneurial path (Koycheva 2019).

Such a construction of the makeathon format observed by Lora had a very purposeful element to it, an almost “explicit by design” approach to setting up an experiential first encounter with entrepreneurship practices, frameworks, and realities for the format’s participants. Although the stakes and limitations were not laid out to participants explicitly (that is, quite to the contrary, the format aimed to give participants a taste of very real stress and pressure), nonetheless it still managed to generate a relatively safe play space with the assumption that play would inspire practical entrepreneurial practice rooted in out-of-sandbox realities. Angela also observed these kinds of explicit sandboxing practices at hackathons, workshops, and meetups. However, in her analysis of innovation culture, she found that the logics and practices of sandboxing had leaked out into implicit sandboxes throughout Stockholm’s ecosystem and entrepreneurial practice that were implied and powerful but uncommunicated and unexamined. This kind of implicit sandboxing turned the beneficial play of Lora’s explicit sandboxes into dangerous and reckless realities.

Angela’s research (2021) examined how and why entrepreneurs with innovative ambitions to “change the world” and “make better futures” were largely failing at these goals while still building massively successful businesses. One facet of this problem she identified was how the practices and values of sandboxing developed within specific events and spaces (e.g., hackathons, maker spaces, educational programs) had come to engulf the entire innovation ecosystem (i.e., events and meetups, co-working programs, investment, and accelerator/incubator programs), sequestering the resources for and practices of entrepreneurship from out-of-ecosystem realities that occurred after the startup’s launch. Social problems, improvisations, and innovations that arise from new products and services were deemed unpredictable and “out of scope,” which led to ecosystem leaders and educators to guide entrepreneurs away from these issues and stick to those elements of business that were conventionally considered in-scope, such as traditional market research, forecasts and trends, hype discourse, and venture capital investment criteria. By sandboxing this form of innovation away from the complexities of social life, it becomes easier to optimize and accelerate its practices and standardize its areas of expertise—as the measures of its success are defined by its internal measures rather than measures of positive social change which require more complex and flexible evaluation methodologies and open one up to liability and responsibility for these outcomes which can be avoided when they are seen as out-of-scope (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Playful decor at a Stockholm-based innovation hub designed to inspire event attendees, co-working members, and guests.

The sandboxing of a social intervention away from the complexities of social life may allow one to more easily standardize and optimize practice. However, this perspective is built on the misguided hubris that entrepreneurs can imagine, invent, and implement a technological intervention and achieve intended social change with it. The social change that motivated the entrepreneurs Angela observed, with all of its complexity and unpredictability commonly understood by anthropology, causes this kind of implicit sandboxing of entrepreneurship to appear irresponsible and limiting. It denies all of the dependencies innovation is always necessarily a part of and restricts who is invited into the innovation’s collaborations and what strategies might be deployed—to only those that are available inside the ecosystem’s sandbox. Thus, Angela calls for such implicit sandboxes to be dismantled in favor of ongoing and ever-emergent interventionist labors. By doing so, one can also renegotiate the terms of responsibility for the impacts of innovations. The sandbox enables entrepreneurs to imagine that they are only responsible for their labors from inside it. But this creates a discourse that unfairly forces them to foresee and prevent all negative outcomes in order to seem ethical or ignore them altogether. Alternatively, procedures in favor of ongoing flows and responsive innovation after a startup’s launch, places innovators into constant collaboration with outcomes making them responsible for their responses to emerging outcomes rather than for predicting them.

It is in the clash of these juxtaposed perspectives and examining the role of the sandbox in entrepreneurship that one thing became very clear: the relationship between the posited boundedness of the innovation sandbox and the wider unbounded realities and complexities of entrepreneurship begged to be scrutinized. In pursuing this objective, we put a call out for work examining what the “breaking of the sandbox of innovation” entails.

The call resulted in a double roundtable at SfAA in 2022. In the present collection, Matt Artz joins us in contributing his original submission, while Matthew Wisnioski, Vanessa de Jesus, Sebastian T. Vetter, Tamas Polanyi, and Liliana Doganova were thoughtful interlocutors whose ideas shared at the panel, but not here, shape our own thinking on the sandbox as a cultural form and innovation artifact during the panel—something we gratefully acknowledge.

The panel was framed around four prompts for the participants to discuss:

1. How does sandboxing shape how we imagine, respond to, and take responsibility for impacts that are outside of the sandbox?

2. How has the hype for innovation reshaped innovation as the potential for impact, rather than the impact itself? Is this different from “innovation theater” and how?

3. Can we—and should we—break the innovation sandbox and build practices of innovation that take seriously and take responsibility for innovation’s role in ceaseless social change?

4. Above all, how can anthropology respond to this challenge—both in its capacity as an applied discipline, working with clients, and as a discipline which must also innovate and create impact itself?

From this discussion, we are happy to invite readers to explore innovation sandboxes with us across UX, theatre, policy, and entrepreneurship. Contributions published in this section have been written by Judith Igelsböck, Matt Artz, Elizabeth Rodwell, and Brice Laurent.

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we would like to thank our fieldwork participants and collaborators. We would like to thank and acknowledge the organizations that funded and supported the research that started this conversation. Angela VandenBroek thanks the American-Scandinavian Foundation for supporting her Stockholm-based research on Innovation through the Thord-Gray Memorial Fund. Lora Koycheva thanks the Joachim Herz Foundation and the Entrepreneurship Research Institute at the Technical Univeristy of Munich. All errors are, as always, our own.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lora Koycheva

Lora Koycheva is an anthropologist, technologist, and founder working at the intersection of anthropology, innovation and entrepreneurship, and robotics. With more than 20 years research experience, she has most recently focused on academic venturing and moonshot innovation practices in Germany, where she has also practiced as a coach and mentor to startups through makeathons and workshops. Together with Matt Artz, she is editor of a book on anthropological careers in emerging tech (forthcoming from Routledge). As a founder, she is currently building Robots, actually!—a global initiative to rebuild the human condition with robots. She has taught and researched at Northwestern University, University College London, and the Technical University of Munich, and is currently assistant professor at the Chair for Technoscience Studies at the Brandenburg Technical University.

Angela VandenBroek

Angela VandenBroek is an assistant professor of anthropology at Texas State University, where she combines her research on innovation and entrepreneurship with her nearly two decades of experience as an applied anthropologist in design, branding, and information technologies in research and teaching. Broadly speaking, her work sits at the intersection of business and design anthropology and science and technology studies and focuses on how ambitions for better futures by states, citizens and entrepreneurs are coopted and reformed by innovation culture and its infrastructures. She’s conducted research in Stockholm Sweden’s startup and innovation ecosystem and has started new research among entrepreneurs in the Texas innovation corridor between Austin and San Antonio.