Creativity on Demand: The Dilemmas of Innovation in an Accelerated Age

Business consultants promote the benefits of innovation, offering courses, workshops, books, and conferences to help businesses succeed. Eitan Wilf's book Creativity on Demand explores how our obsession with innovation stems from the long-standing value of acceleration in capitalist society, revealing how procedures and strategies are repeated in a formulaic way and imagination is harnessed as a new professional ethos.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 240 pages
\n Publication date: 04 February 2019
\n Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
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Business consultants across the globe advocate the virtues of innovation, promising to assist businesses in reaping its rewards. This trendy industry revolves around various offerings such as courses, workshops, books, and conferences, all purporting to hold the keys to success. However, the concept of innovation begs the question: what exactly are the promises it entails? What distinguishes the ideology and practice of business innovation from other consulting firms, enabling them to successfully market their services to a diverse range of clients, from small start-ups to Fortune 500 companies?

Most importantly, what does business innovation mean for work and our economy in the year 2019? In his book Creativity on Demand, cultural anthropologist Eitan Wilf delves into these critical inquiries by revisiting the fundamental and pervasive expectation of continual business innovation. Wilf meticulously examines how our obsession with innovation is rooted in the longstanding value of acceleration in capitalist society. Through ethnographic research with innovation consultants in the United States, he unveils a range of surprising findings, including how routine the culture of innovation is in practice. Procedures and strategies are often replicated in a formulaic manner, with imagination being harnessed as a new professional ethos, not always to generate genuinely novel thinking but rather to produce predictable signs of continual change.

Creativity on Demand serves as a groundbreaking model for the anthropological study of our cultures of work. It sheds light on the contradictions of our capitalist age and provides valuable insights into the ways in which our societies are shaped by the dynamics of innovation and productivity. By exploring the intersection of culture, work, and economic systems, Wilf offers a thought-provoking examination of the complex dynamics that drive our modern workplaces. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the evolving landscape of work and the challenges and opportunities that it presents.

\n Weight: 320g\n
Dimension: 155 x 229 x 13 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780226606972\n \n