Art Hacking for Business Innovation: An Exploratory Case Study on Applied Artistic Strategies

Berit Sandberg

doi:10.3390/joitmc5010020

Abstract

Despite a growing interest in the effects of arts-based interventions on organizational change, concepts aiming at business innovation and product development other than residencies are rare. Furthermore, little is known about the role and impact of artists involved in idea-generating formats. How does the personal presence of artists in a heterogenous working group influence the procedure? To what extent do artists unfold their creative qualities while dealing with such a non-artistic challenge? The paper introduces a method named Art Hacking that applies professional labour attitudes typical for artists and artistic modes of thinking to business problems and enhances the approach by having artists attend the whole intervention. One of these events was taken as a case for exploring the role of four artists in the collective idea-generation process. The results of participatory observation along critical incident technique substantiate the thesis that in interdisciplinary “playgrounds” artists implicitly become process leaders. They are catalysts for awareness, sensemaking and change of perspective.

Highlights

In a complex and rapidly changing business world in which planning is falling to growing uncertainty, creativity has become a key resource [1,2]
Beyond Art Hacking, there is little evidence regarding how artists conduct themselves in arts-based interventions that are about developing approaches for intra-organizational problems and setting an impulse for change
Artists have distinguished art-making from their “way of organizing and acquiring knowledge” [82] (27 s) by naming the latter Art Thinking [82], whereas business people start using the term for a transfer of insights from the art into the business world

Summary

Introduction

In a complex and rapidly changing business world in which planning is falling to growing uncertainty, creativity has become a key resource [1,2]. 160) cannot be solved by rational, analytic approaches. As “art is a question and an attempt to answer it” (Alicja Kwade, visual artist) [4] (para 16), artists are used to coping with uncertainty and well adapted to moving in complex environments. The artistic process is about exploring unknown paths, radically changing directions if necessary, making detours, abandoning failure and starting anew. Artists are working with methods that differ from rational, systematic management procedures by candour, mindfulness and intuition [5,6]. As artistic labour reaches far beyond analytical methods, artistic attitudes open different interpretations of reality (sensemaking) [7,8]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion