Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs: Popular Strategies for Innovation After the End of Endings, by Murat Karamuftuoglu (muratkaramuftuoglu@gmail.com). Published in April 2013 by zer0 books. Here’s a short summary of it:
Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs is about invention and innovation in the context of postmodern society and information economy. It applies “popular culture” theory to such companies as Virgin, Microsoft, and Apple, to analyse their innovation strategies. This is the first book of its kind that mingles popular culture theory with innovation theory and entrepreneurship. It is written, true to the spirit of popular culture, in a lively style with abundant popular cultural references, and textual and visual puns.
And here’s a longer one:
This book is about invention and innovation in the context of postmodern society and information economy. It applies “popular culture” theory to such companies as Virgin, Microsoft, and Apple, to analyse their innovation strategies. This is the first book of its kind that mingles popular culture theory with innovation theory and entrepreneurship. It is written, true to the spirit of popular culture, in a lively style with abundant popular cultural references, and textual and visual puns.
The central argument of the book is that dualisms of mind and body, thinking and doing, are false, and joyful, skilled, playful activities and practices are the basis of most, if not all, inventions and innovations. This perspective puts the practice of everyday life at the heart of invention and innovation. According to a certain strand of postmodern thought we need nothing more than language and information; we are indeed language and information. Life is made of information. Invention and innovation are thus reduced to language games and combinations at will of disembodied and decontextualised information relieved from all chains that hold it hostage to the material reality. This book argues to the contrary: we cannot innovate by thinking alone. Invention and innovation are not only a matter of language games or information logics; it is predominantly a matter of material activities and practices. We are not disembodied ether-like creatures. We live and inhabit a material world within which all inventions and innovations take place. Innovation strategies that are uncovered in the book range from popular pleasures to use the words of John Fiske, Professor of Communication Arts, and a well-known theorist of popular culture, to “ontic shifts of discovery”. The common denominator shared by all is a shift from cognition to activity in the words of Fred Newman and Lois Holzman, renegade psychotherapists and political activists, and inventors of social therapy, an activity-theoretic approach to therapy and learning. The common lesson shared by all is that joyful, skilled, playful experimentation in the real world usually provides a more favourable climate for inventions than controlled laboratory experiments. Innovation follows when one sees in the invention the potential for introducing new meaningful differences to the world, which are pleasurable and relevant to others’ lives and everyday experiences.
Some innovation principles that are suggested by the examples discussed in the book include:
- Challenge the establishment, risk, venture.
- Value popular pleasures.
- Avoid over theorizing.
- Populate the world with new entities, bodies, and relationships between them.
The book has many unique features and firsts:
- Application of popular cultural theory to innovation and entrepreneurship for the first time.
- Integration of the micro- (company-level) and macro- levels of analysis of innovation economics.
- Analysis of the twin processes of invention and innovation in a historical perspective from the days of the Age of Discovery to Richard Branson’s world record attempts at circumnavigating the globe and his other adventures.
- Application of philosophical criticism of mind-body dualism to the process of innovation.
- Application of the economic psychology theory of the long-neglected French sociologist Gabriel Tarde to the economics of innovation in the context of the
- Internet and information society.
- It contains several manifesto-like assertions regarding, what is called in the book, the future popular economy of the people.
Rowdy Entrepreneurs and Insecure Dinosaurs 