Collective improvisation as a means to responsibly govern serendipity in social innovation processes

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on how collective improvisation, as a play with situational affordances and constraints, can facilitate or elicit luck in social innovation processes. We propose the improvisation perspective to offer a means to move from ungovernable to governable serendipity in innovation. Furthermore, the article presents Trasformatorio, an innovation methodology based on the living lab approach, that takes innovation-through-improvisation as its premise. Following an analysis of Trasformatorio’s social innovation efforts, we conclude that while governing serendipity may be a challenge, improvisation provides an opportunity to innovate responsibly. Improvisation refocuses ideas about unexpectedness and anchors the unforeseen to a process approach. This, in turn, leads to insights about how responsible social innovation can be governed by means of (1) situation awareness; (2) collective brokering; and (3) explicit reflection about how product and process, here conceptualised as part of a Design Space and Narrative Space respectively, interrelate.

KEYWORDS:

• Serendipity
• improvisation
• co-creation
• Trasformatorio
• social innovation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the LEDGER project and its participants for sharing their experiences, and would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful suggestions throughout the review process. The authors also thank Dan Leberg for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Sabrina Sauer is an assistant professor at the University of Groningen's Research Centre for Media and Journalism Studies. She has an M.A. in Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam and a Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Twente. She has published about audiovisual narrative creation, user research, exploratory search, and serendipity. Her current research focuses on the use of Big Data in media production practices, social innovation, interdisciplinary brokering, and digital humanities.

Federico Bonelli is an independent researcher and artist. He has training in philosophy of science, history of mathematics and arts. Bonelli is not only an explorer of aesthetic forms, but also an empirical researcher. He previously worked with Philips Research and other artists on realising the Protoquadro (2003): a deterministic techno-pictorical object in constant change, never equal to itself and unpredictable. Since 2012 he directs the international site-specific laboratory ‘trasformatorio’ he founded.

Notes

1 For a complete overview of the 16 start-ups, please see https://ledgerproject.eu/2019/05/30/ledger-selects-16-human-centric-projects-working-on-decentralised-technologies-to-enter-its-venture-builder-programme/.