Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age by Eitan Y. Wilf

Abstract

Reviewed by: Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age by Eitan Y. Wilf Chuck Darrah Eitan Y. Wilf, Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 240 pp. Eitan Y. Wilf, Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. 240 pp. Creativity, long associated with an artistic temperament and an untamed, unpredictable quality, has become a necessity of business and industry in an era of post-Fordist flexible accumulation. Ironically, as creativity has become more important, its production has been routinized through a step-by-step process performed by practitioners who have been properly trained. That process, the case for it, and its reverberations in and beyond business and industry in the United States are explored in Eitan Y. Wilf's Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age. Wilf describes a world in which the status quo is never quite good enough and the way ahead is through innovating, a mark of the rational organization. He develops the case that post-Fordist flexible accumulation proceeds rapidly by introducing new products and services, which in turn requires matching needs with ways to address them. Production of creativity is a precursor to innovation and because of the logic of flexible accumulation it must be controlled so it can be rapidly focused on "monetizable products and services" (7). In Chapters 1 and 2, Wilf argues that creativity may be facilitated by providing opportunities for synergistic encounters in open office spaces or, more broadly, in urban settings that bring together people with diverse interests and perspectives. Both may enable creativity, but the processes of doing so may be slowed by false starts and a lack of focus on necessary innovations. Accordingly, a cottage industry of innovation mentors offers [End Page 237] the possibilities of rapid creativity and its simultaneous containment; efficiency and effectiveness are on offer as a Romantic vision of creativity is combined with practices and ethics of professionalism. Accordingly, the production of creativity becomes developed through a rational, step-by-step process. It is less about blinding insights by savants than the deliberate creation of "pseudo-accidents" in which the status quo is broken by "deforming" extant products so new possibilities emerge. Organizations always must be on guard against threats posed by new products and services, so developing the capacity to routinely generate useful deformations is an investment in protecting a company's products and services by enhancing its capacity to innovate. The methods of creating pseudo-accidents and the perceived need for haste drive the process. Chapter 3 argues that products evolve as repositories of patterned transformations of characteristics that provide bases for further evolution (i.e., innovation), rather than on engaging markets (i.e., consumers) to assess needs. In fact, focusing on consumer needs may delay discovering potential product characteristics. Wilf explores the basis for this product focus through concepts and analytical strategies developed by Goldenberg and Mazursky in Creativity in Product Innovation (2002), in which products are systematically analyzed for deeper patterns that have evolved to meet customer needs. Goldenberg and Mazursky's five "creativity templates" reflect processes of product innovation that provide bases for further innovation, one that avoids the need to directly engage consumers and markets. The product is thus treated as a substitute for people, one in which deep patterns of transformation can be read by a product developer. This is not a matter of identifying characteristics of the products to develop or not, but rather to explicate the product's creative potential that novices may be unable to understand. Of course, this brings a danger of parochialism if analysts create a self-referencing system that discovers and enacts the same patterns repeatedly. Wilf delves into the details of how innovation is enabled in Chapter 4 by a "Post-it culture" in which "pseudo-data" are created and manipulated for insights. Post-its are ubiquitous props used to support creativity methods and can contain small strings of text that are ultimately abstracted from their contexts. Their small size enables this compression and so the writing on them may become increasingly...