Abstract
Innovation sandboxing describes a set of entrepreneurial practices that have become popular in creating those confined atmospheres in which creativity and imaginative freedom—regarded as key ingredients in the processes of innovating—can unfold freely and undisturbed by the complexities of the outside world. While sandboxing—in the sense of focusing on distinct realities while disregarding others—might be inevitable in any innovation process, social researchers have criticized that the popularization of sandboxing methods has come without the necessary reflection on how what happens in the sandbox relates to and ultimately impacts the outside world. In this article, I share insights from the Enacting Innovation project. I showcase what participatory theater performance and artistic research can offer for our understanding of innovation sandboxing and the related processes of opening up to and secluding from the outside world. Moreover, I propose potential entry-points for the initiation of responsible re-thinking and re-design of sandboxes based on the learnings from developing and staging Enacting Innovation.
PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY
Sandboxing describes a set of innovation practices that have become popular in creating those confined atmospheres in which creativity and imaginative freedom can unfold freely and undisturbed by the complexities of the outside world. In one form or another, sandboxing might be inevitable in any innovation process. However, social researchers have criticized that the popularization of sandboxing methods has come without the necessary reflection on their relation to and impact on the outside world. In this article, I share insights from the project Enacting Innovation and what it can offer for our understanding of innovation sandboxing and the possibilities of taking responsibility issues into account. Enacting Innovation is an artistic research project in which, in a team of theater makers, creative coders and researchers, we transformed insights from social research on imitative innovation behaviors into a participatory innovation theater show which has been staged at a renown international electronic arts festival. Enacting Innovation makes us wonder whether specific sandboxing methods and tools have become popular because of their actual effectiveness in innovation processes or rather because of reasons of uncertainty, legitimacy, or because we have learned that this is how innovating works. Enacting Innovation sparks hope that sandboxing can be re-imagined and re-learned in a more responsible way. What role does the innovation guru play in this endeavor? And what if the applied anthropologist herself could become an innovation guru?
You have inscribed for the performance Enacting Innovation as part of your visit of a renown new media arts festival. You feel a bit nervous. The label participatory indicates that you will be expected to actively take part in the performance. When you arrive on the top floor of the new university building you can quickly spot the stage. It is composed of four podiums, three of which equipped with touchscreens while the 4th podium is presented in a lounge style and equipped with retro-futuristic chairs (see ).
Figure 1. The stage of Enacting Innovation with different podiums for its players.
As soon as all of the eight participants have arrived, one of the creators of Enacting Innovation starts briefing you on how to play. Every performer is invited to impersonate a member of an unspecified organization and perform innovation activities of different kind. You volunteer for playing a team maker representing a member of the human resource department of the organization (see ).
Figure 2. Playing a team maker.
In the moment in which all of the participants have chosen their role and entered their podium, the play begins. The communication with other participants is organized via whiteboards, sticky notes, and cameras. What you write down on a sticky note and fix on your whiteboard is appearing on the other participants’ screens (see ).
Figure 3. Communicating with other participants in Enacting Innovation via white boards, sticky notes and cameras.
You assume that this way of communicating was mostly chosen because of the distancing rules at that time. Certainly, whiteboards and sticky notes have also become icons of innovating, and maybe the creators of the performance might have wanted to play a little bit with that. You feel slightly overwhelmed when you see a message appearing on your screen: “Help, I need a team, don’t care who!” There is a pool of potential team members in your team maker application. Each member has values attached to them which creates the appearance that they have gone through an assessment before. It reminds you a bit of a matchmaking platform. You put together a team, and send it off to the other station.
In the middle of the stage, there lies a big screen. You are so focused on your tasks that you do not find the time to really check what is shown on it, but you will learn later that it is conceived as a window to the outside of the organization providing you with relevant news and trends (see ).
Figure 4. A poetic image of the outside of an organization, as screened in Enacting Innovation.
On the podium next to you, there is the station of the gurus comfortably sitting in their chairs and typing answers to questions the organizations seeks their advice on (see ). To your right, you can observe the team of the landscape explorers (see ). They are searching for trendy formats and initiating projects to boost the innovative ability of the organization. A bit further away, you can spot the fourth station named orga-flow (see ). As you will learn later, it is all about reforming the organization and bringing diverse departments in line with a modern style of working; a difficult endeavor. The reformers can only make progress when being supported by the team of the landscape explorers who are initiating projects aimed at easing the members of the respective department into accepting the changes the orga-flow team has planned. The teams for carrying out these projects, in turn, need to be requested from you, the team-maker.
Figure 5. The guru is invited by the organization to share her advice on different innovation matters.
Figure 6. The landscape explorers looking out for new ways of boosting the innovative ability of the organization.
Figure 7. The orga-flow station devoted to changing the innovation culture of the organization.
After a few minutes, the players are asked to take a break from playing and step down from the podium for an intervention. You are being equipped with a pad that allows you to peek behind the curtain into the underneath—into the hidden, the unrepresented, the problematic, and the magical in innovation processes—by entering different artificial reality stages (see and read more about it below). You are exploring several of them.
Figure 8. Artificial reality stages: a peek behind the curtains—into the non-rational, the hidden, the problematic, and the magical in innovating.
After a while you are asked to continue playing, this time in the role of a landscape explorer. You are in the midst of discovering new innovation formats when all of the players are invited to leave the stage to join an informal chat about the experience with Enacting Innovation which marks the official end of the performance.
Enacting Innovation—A Literal Innovation Theater
You just joined a virtual-walk through the participatory performance Enacting Innovation which was conceptualized as literal innovation theater play. The expression innovation theater is commonly used in a derogatory manner to refer to organizational innovation measures that make an organization look innovative, but do not actually increase its innovativeness. Enacting Innovation, in contrast, approaches innovation theater in a more optimistic way—setting hopes in the capability of theatrical techniques to spark both our understanding of the complex realities of organizational innovating and our imagination about how to create awareness for responsibility issues connected to innovation practices.
Enacting Innovation was featured at the renown media arts festival Ars Electronica Festival in 2020 (explore the festival catalogue here: https://archive.aec.at/media/assets/ad4af7ffc24fdcedbcee6ee43468dadc.pdf) and funded by the Johannes Kepler University’s festival call which attempted to creatively and artistically showcase research performed at the university. The funding opened up the unique opportunity to re-articulate my social research on innovation with the theater makers and creative coders from the network of the group Spiel and Objekt (https://spielundobjekt.de/) of the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin. Together we designed Enacting Innovation as participatory theater play on and, more importantly, with the contemporary innovation imperative, the scriptedness of organizational innovating, as well as societal impacts that come with the ways in which we innovate today. Our ambition was to make contemporary innovation dynamics experienceable to the diverse festival audience, to create the possibility for the critical re-imagination of innovating as organizational practice, and to provoke thinking about our powers of steering and interfering with processes of societal change and renewal.
The background of Enacting Innovation is the advance of innovation into one of the most pervasive and unquestioned contemporary ideologies (see, e.g., Vinsel Citation2015). Together with the rise of innovation as a preferable way of performing societal change, being innovative and showing innovativeness have become integral components of organizational life. Organizational innovators have been looking out for the best ways to be and stay innovative, which has led to a paradoxical situation. While innovation keeps being tightly entangled with the romantic ideals of creativity and originality—as expressed in the cult of single innovators, their celebration as super-heroes or the public derision of copy-cats, organizational innovating appears to be characterized by so-called isomorphic or imitative processes (DiMaggio and Powell Citation1983). In a nutshell, isomorphic processes describe a dynamic in which “actors make their organizations increasingly similar, as they try to change them” (147) or, in this case, as they try to innovate. Such isomorphic processes can also be observed with regards to what has become known as innovation sandboxing.
Innovation sandboxes—just like a sandbox in a playground—are safe spaces created for keeping away unnecessarily complex realities and providing the experimental conditions in which innovations can thrive. They have gained prominence as regulatory sandboxes—a sort of supervised, legal and time-limited outlaw zone that governments grant for testing innovations (see e.g., Buocz, Pfotenhauer, and Eisenberger Citation2023). Innovation sandboxing, as I use it in this article, relates more broadly to the practices of seclusion and focus that might be inevitable in any innovation endeavor. Yet the popularization of innovation sandboxing methods and tools has widely “happened without reflexivity on how they shape the ways in which we imagine, respond to, and take responsibility for the impacts they have outside their sandbox walls,” as Koycheva and VandenBroek highlight in their introduction to this special issue (a similar argument is also produced by e.g., Buocz, Pfotenhauer, and Eisenberger Citation2023).
With this article, I seek to contribute to the understanding of the difficulties and ambivalences in innovating which innovators intend to solve with the installation of innovation sandboxes and the adoption of sandboxing practices, as well as the possibilities and impossibilities of breaking the sandboxes of innovation in the sense of making space for responsibility issues that have remained unattended. To do so, I share what I learned about sandboxing through developing and staging the participatory theater performance and artistic research project Enacting Innovation. In the following, I will first outline some relevant details about the theoretical framing and development of the performance. In the main analytical part, I will problematize innovation sandboxing based on three elements of aesthetic dramatization in the theater performance: the outside, the guru, and the underneath. The discussion will be devoted to the possibilities of rethinking and re-designing the innovation sandbox with a focus on the applied anthropologist’s role in such a conceptualization.
Dramaturgical Techniques and the Study of Innovation
In the production of Enacting Innovation, we deployed theatrical techniques in two main ways:
We based Enacting Innovation on social research in which I worked with dramaturgical metaphors as analytical devices to understand organizations’ innovation activities (see Igelsböck Citation2022; Igelsböck and Schüßler Citation2019). Concretely, I was interested in isomorphic (or imitative) processes with regards to the composition of actors, organizations put in charge of innovating and the atmospheres they create to spark innovation. As for example, these days many organizations hire innovation managers and trend scouts, and invite consultants, gurus and so-called friendly rivals to keep up to date with their innovation practices. Also, there is a tendency to install innovation rooms or open labs to facilitate innovation or experiment with formats, such as mystery lunches. Moreover, symbolic spaces, such as the green field or the safe room are believed to play a relevant role in the atmospheric universes in which innovations can grow.
The insights from the empirical study of innovation have been used as an inspiration for the innovation theater play. Sharing and discussing research materials and findings with the theater team was one of our first collective activities in the development process. Accordingly, there exists a sort of linear trajectory between research and its transformation into a performance. It wasn’t our goal to educate participants by showing factual knowledge about innovating. This is what differentiates Enacting Innovation from research-based theater which is known for its “relentless pursuit of naturalism” or the attempt to “capture objective reality” (see e.g., Snyder-Young Citation2010, 890) for the purpose of education. Rather, we were aiming to create a performance in which participants can indulge in the situation of organizing innovation activities and make up their minds about the complex processes, challenges and multiple layers that are related to the question of how to innovate (see also Criado Citation2021, who has published a review addressing the science communication aspect of Enacting Innovation).
More generally, we consider the process of developing and staging Enacting Innovation as part of the research process that gives us the opportunity for re-interpretation, re-focusing, expansion, questioning, and re-imagining of what had previously been investigated with a more classical qualitative research design. Accordingly, we think of Enacting Innovation as a form of research that, rather than being the mere outreach or communication exercise, can be regarded as integral part of the research process (see also Arlander et al. Citation2017). Last, but not least, we also echo the belief in the theater’s potential to emancipation (as stressed by e.g., Cinque and Nyberg Citation2021) and its ability make us see innovating differently and open up for new ways of practicing and organizing innovation processes or, more broadly, our approaches to societal change.
What We Could Learn about Innovation Sandboxing through Developing and Staging Enacting Innovation
Organizations aspiring to innovate operate on a fine line between opening up to the outside world and secluding or sandboxing to create an intimate environment for innovators to tinker freely and safely. The issues of responsibility related to this balancing act between confronting certain realities and protecting from others, between considering certain problems and disregarding others, to be able to focus on the innovation at hand, were at the center of our problematization in Enacting Innovation, specifically so in the aesthetic dramatization of the outside, the guru and the underneath. I want to share what we could learn about innovation sandboxing through these three elements.
The outside
In the tinkering and development phase of Enacting Innovation the outside became one major element we wanted to give space to and problematize. The outside represents what organizations consider as their relevant organizational environment including potential addressees of an innovation in the making and more broadly “the world” the innovation to be is created for. From what I have been told repeatedly by innovators in my interviews, organizations need to nurture an ambivalent relationship to the outside. Many innovators mention the increasing pervasiveness of the ideology of open innovation and the belief that organizations need to search for active exchange and collaboration with actors from outside of their organization to be able to be and stay innovative. Simultaneously, organizations invest in the creation of safe and confined play spaces (e.g., innovation rooms, creativity rooms, formats such as mystery lunches, innovation breakfasts, innovation challenges, etc.) in which—what was often referred to as—innovation magic can unfold freely.
The attention organizations pay to operations at the border between the outside and the inside of an organization articulates in the set of actors who become part of innovation ensembles (i.e., the composition of actors gathered to innovate). Not only is there a whole range of outsiders who tend to get invited to join an organization’s innovation team (at least temporarily), be it the advisor, guru, user or friendly rival, but there are also core members of the innovation ensemble, such as the trend scout, whose primary task is to observe and interpret what is going on in the outside world—observation that would then be used to re-evaluate and adjust their own innovation measures. The presence of the thief-of-ideas figure hints to the delicacy in any organizational attempts of reaching out to the outside world. As a consequence, organizations—instead of randomly opening up—tend to carefully orchestrate their operations at the border.
In the performance of Enacting Innovation, we collectively designed what our theater makers referred to as a poetic moving image of the outside that materialized as a massive screen in the middle of the stage that could be watched by all of the players at any time of the performance, even though they might not have been paying much attention to it because were so focused on their own tasks (such as hiring people, forming innovation teams, working on the innovation culture of the organization, etc.). During the development, we used to refer to the materialization of the outside as the big screen (see above). The big screen showed different forms of live data and gave information about innovation trends, as for instance, in the form of prominent sayings about innovation.
The window to the outside was created to remind us that an organizational environment is not given at any time, but is continuously produced and reproduced depending on what an organization is choosing to look at or pay attention to. In the very attempts of observing the outside when innovating or also creating innovation sandboxes to seclude oneself from the outside, not only the innovation itself but the very world in which this innovation could be considered as innovation including imagined users gets (re-)created. These intricate dynamics shed light on the responsibility issues that come with innovation sandboxing. The practices of configuring innovation sandboxes, the infrastructures and procedures devised, and the decisions on who gets invited to play in the innovation sandbox both literally and discursively, have formative effects on what lies outside of the sandbox.
The guru
From the vast pool of outsiders, organizations resort to when innovating, the figure of the guru has attracted a lot of fascination in the collective process of tinkering with possible game dynamics and features in Enacting Innovation. The guru—as she is moving from one organization to the next to share her advice—is not only a symbol for the increasing pervasiveness of the ideology of open innovation but also for isomorphism in innovating. Isomorphism being the phenomenon where sandboxes in specific and innovative atmospheres at large resemble one another because organizations imitate and copy them for reasons of legitimacy, uncertainty or because of socialization and education (see also DiMaggio and Powell Citation1983). Once the guru gets invited to revise and inspire an organization’s innovation practice, she finds herself in a powerful position in which she can get to shape how innovating is done.
In Enacting Innovation, we built a station in which players were invited to impersonate the guru and provide the organization with advice on how to innovate (see above). In doing so, the impersonator of the guru is asked to reply to questions that were designed in the style of a chat over a coffee: What do you do when you feel uninspired? Do you like to be surprised? What is the best place for gossip in the office? etc. And while the player impersonating the guru is typing and ticking answers to these questions, she might ask herself: Why does the organization chose these questions? What do they do with my reply? Will they believe in my answers myself? Would I also act according to my own advice?
In the performance, we do not disclose how exactly the guru’s choices influence the game dynamics. Yet, we wanted to hint more vaguely at the power of the innovation gurus—“especialistas en magnificar sus conocimientos y habilidades (…) y minimizar sus errores” [specialists in magnifying their expertise and skills (…) and downplaying their mistakes] (Aibar Citation2023, 117)—in shaping current innovation practices and dynamics and problematize the responsibilities that come with this power.
The underneath
In my research, I was puzzled by the narrations of what I thought were paradoxical practices and beliefs. On the one hand, organizations were eagerly working on professionalizing and formalizing their innovation activities (often with the installation of innovation managers, devices that allowed organizations to measure and evaluate their innovation performance and formats and atmospheres that would spark innovative practice). On the other hand, my informants kept insisting that, in the end, all of these efforts of managing innovation would not really matter, since innovating would always remain mysterious, magical, and impossible to control. Put in other words, there was said to be a side to innovating which widely eludes attempts of rationalization and management; a side that cannot be explained and represented, such as luck or a flash of genius, or what is believed to be intrinsic to the innovator as person, such as mind-set or gut-feeling. The editors of a special issue entitled “On Hell” in performance research (D’Arcy and Gough Citation2021) inspired me to think of this side as the underneath, complementing the frontstages of innovation devoted to proving and showing an organization’s innovativeness and their backstages dominated by the innovation management’s rationalized measures and evaluations.
Interestingly, the myths my informants shared about the underneath were surprisingly homogeneous. This leads me to think of the underneath as a protected space that organizations maintain as a counterforce to the open display of what is often called innovation theater including the outwards-oriented innovation activities shown on the frontstages and the rationalized and permanently evaluated management of innovation activities in the backstages. Due to its hidden nature, the underneath, accordingly, is the space organizations can entertain without being accountable for what is going on in it. Boxenbaum and Jonsson (Citation2017) describe such mechanisms as decoupling referring to the way in which organizations disentangle formal structure from action so that they can secure their internal practices. Put differently, organizations create the appearance of what is widely conceived as innovative organization to solve paradoxes in contemporary innovating (e.g., ideology of open innovation vs. necessary secrecy when innovating; the idea that innovativeness needs to be managed vs. contingency in innovating) and hide and protect facets of an organization’s innovation tradition that no longer match with the image of an innovative organization (e.g., gender imbalances, see more Igelsböck Citation2022).
In Enacting Innovation, we created an upper stage in which our players were busy with managing innovation by hiring people, forming teams, making innovative projects, observing the outside, reeducating departments, etc. and the underneath. The underneath was designed as a peek behind the curtains into the non-represented and representable, the hidden, the problematic, or the “magical” in innovating by entering different artificial reality stages (see above). For example, one artificial reality stage was addressing contingency and luck in innovating, another one problematized the cult of single innovators yet another one problematized colonialism and exclusion in innovating.
Innovation sandboxing, as we find it being popularized, could be characterized as method of cultivating the underneath and provoking innovation magic through play, but also opening up the possibility to keep certain innovation processes hidden or under the radar, while giving the appearance that everything is being openly managed and controlled.
Discussion
In this article I investigated innovation sandboxes and the responsibilities that arise from their installation by means of theatrical techniques. Concretely, I deployed theatrical metaphors as research devices to understand contemporary innovation practices and later translated these insights together with theater makers and creative coders into the literal innovation theater show entitled Enacting Innovation and developed for and staged at the Ars Electronica Festival.
In Enacting Innovation, we created an upper stage in which the players were invited to manage innovation and prove innovative ability, but also an artificial reality stage representing the underneath and highlighting the continued importance of the unrepresentable, magical and uncontrolled in innovating. In doing so, we wanted to hint to our impression that organizations adopt popular innovation methods, such as sandboxing frameworks, as part of what is widely considered as innovation theater. This creates the appearance of a modern and innovative organization while organizations can keep entertaining practices that do no longer conform with the ideas of a modern innovative organization. Accordingly, sandboxing may need to be understood as yet another innovation practice that belongs to the wide range of innovation management tools that—rather than necessarily actually boosting an organization’s innovation performance—are deployed for reasons of uncertainty, legitimacy, or because we learned that this is how innovating works nowadays. Either way, sandboxing practices matter in the above problematized sense that the moments of seclusion from the outside paradoxically always imply the configuration of the outside, which moves the very design of the innovation sandbox as responsibility issue to centerstage. Here the figure of the guru is one of the most popular outsiders with the powers to shape the design and use of sandboxes. The popularity of the guru and the exposition of innovation tools to their re-evaluation and experimental remaking could be thought of as “strategic device” (see Kezar and Bernstein-Sierra Citation2019) to provoke responsible re-makings of the innovation sandbox. Concretely, we could think about the applied anthropologist as guru who does not only share her insights on contemporary innovation dynamics to organizations, but also works on bringing into the sandbox actors that have discursively and literally been uninvited, shedding light on blank spots of innovation methods, or challenging the logics tied to sandboxing.
Acknowledgments
I would like to cordially thank my collaborators Sarah Buser, Friedrich Kirschner, Mónica Rikić, Leoni Voegelin, Tomás Montes Massa and Laura Zoelzer for joining the production of Enacting Innovation with so much passion, openness and endurance. Moreover, I thankfully acknowledge financial support provided by the Linz Institute of Technology (LIT) of the Johannes Kepler University of Linz (JKU).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Judith Igelsböck
Judith Igelsböck is a social researcher of emerging technologies and innovation. She has worked in various research areas, including human computer and human robot interaction, work studies, science and technology studies, and innovation and organization studies. Judith approaches her research projects in a post-disciplinary and experimental mood and enjoys working with artists. One of her current obsessions is the fusion of theatrical play and innovation research. You are welcome to reach out to Judith via email.
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