The gray zones of innovation: the illegal and the informal in marginal worlds

This special cluster aims to put together works analyzing gray processes of illegal/informal innovation in the global south including territorialities such as Brazilian shantytowns, South African informal dwellings, or demining zones in Colombian rural areas, among others. The objective is to overtake the security and economic approaches to see the kind of knowledge, designs, technologies, techniques, learnings, or shrewdness flowing through local contexts of illegality and informality. The goal, in other words, is to address questions such as: how does the illegal/informal shape innovation? How could these types of creativities that emerge in these gray environments be characterized?

Where does innovation come from? There is a direct link with productive centers such as laboratories, industries, institutes, states, firms, clusters, or academia. These spaces have caught much of the scholarly fascination for knowledge and creativity. However, there are other spaces where innovation also occurs: the gray zones of illegality and informality. Usually considered as “backyards”, these zones represent true breeding grounds for innovation; very often the most arresting practices emerge in these chaotic and dim zones.

There has been a rapid recent growth of academic interest in previously neglected processes of innovation at the margins, including contexts of illegality/informality. As noticed by Hudson (2019), capitalist economic processes had been conceived as something exclusive of formal/legal settings leaving aside the various geographies of economies, such as the gray zones of innovation. Disciplines such as Economics, Informatics, War Studies, and Development Studies have paved the way by approaching these issues mostly from security or economic perspectives. These fields study the illegal/informal either for giving recommendations to improve security or for measuring impacts of the informal economy in relation to poverty and development. Let us review both levels briefly.

On the one hand, Malevolent creativity, proposed by Terrorism Studies, frames the discussion around the dark nature of creativity and innovation within terrorist organizations (Cropley, Kaufman, and Cropley 2008; Gill et al. 2013; Cropley 2017). Underground innovation, introduced by Management and Informatics researchers, analyzes the under the table initiatives that end up benefiting specific legal markets (Abetti 1997; Mollick 2005). There are also other concepts such as organizational learning to understand the way terrorists groups learn (Kenney 2008; Jackson et al. 2005); and communities of practices to grasp the way outlawed networks work internationally (Bueger 2013; Kenney 2017).

On the other hand, Innovations below the radar, from Development Studies, places the debate in terms of innovations for low-income consumers at the bottom of the pyramid produced by emerging markets or particulars in developing countries such as China or India (Kaplinsky et al. 2009; Kaplinsky 2011). Grassroots innovations, conceived by Indian activists first and then followed by Latin American social scientists, aims to empower communities and individuals to transform their ideas into useful products and services by blending science, technology, design, and risk capital (Gupta 2013; Hilmi 2012; Cozzens and Sutz 2012). Frugal innovation, moreover, was conceptualized by business research authors for the Indian case and describes the idea of doing more with less “by leveraging limited resources or lacklustre institutions, and to achieve ends that serve more people who have less” (Bhatti and Ventresca 2013, 16; Bhatti, Khilji, and Basu 2013; Hossain, Simula, and Halme 2016).

This idea of doing more with less has been formulated with other labels and nuances: Jugaad, for instance, is a Hindi word for “innovative fix; an improvised solution born from ingenuity and cleverness” (Radjou, Prabhu, and Ahuja 2012); Shanzhai, a Chinese word that highlights the non-mainstream products or the replicas of popular brands where inventiveness and rebellion are mixed to compete with global corporations (Dong and Flowers 2016); and inventiveness by necessity referring to the type of means and knowledge people are forced to look for to solve their practical needs (Usenyuk, Hyysalo, and Whalen 2016).

Similar concepts might be pro-poor innovation, innovation oriented to social inclusion, inclusive innovation, reverse innovation, or disruptive innovation (Ramani, SadreGhazi, and Duysters 2010; Arocena and Sutz 2012; Bianchi et al. 2013; Govindarajan and Trimble 2012; George, McGahan, and Prabhu 2012; Markides 2006; Guttentag 2015). The three last concepts frame the discussion in asymmetrical north–south market relations. These concepts show optimism in informal initiatives at the bottom of the income pyramid. Although the general framework does not apply to the thesis, the value they give to what is generally worthless is noteworthy. Thinking from below the radar or from frugal interactions from the grassroots “Requires harnessing the minds on the margin that are not marginal minds” (Gupta 2013, 20).

A crop of recent studies has put to the fore the need to decentralize innovation from the usual scenarios as well as to go beyond traditional motivations. For example, Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies (STIS) have been instrumental to understand the interrelationships between different locations, materialities, and conditions of the illegal/informal. For example, authors such as Bess and Enciso (2017), Cohen, Cohen, and Li (2017), Guerrero-C (2019), and Martin (2019) have proposed the need to integrate artifacts and infrastructures required for the understanding of drug trafficking that until recently has been analyzed as a security concern and from economical and organizational points of view, in which academics took the state point of view as focal interest. Pinto-García (2019) and Moreno-M (2020) have analyzed guerrilla warfare and clandestinity as spaces of knowledge and creativity.

A handful of concepts aimed at the study of technological innovation help to produce the complex entanglements between legality and illegality. A remarkable example is the concept of outlaw innovation, suggested by STIS scholars to describe innovation in hacking activities and online piracy and their relations with intellectual property rights (Jordan and Taylor 1998; Schulz and Wagner 2008; Flowers 2008; Söderberg 2010, 2017; Maxigas 2017). This concept has shown the importance of conflicts for innovation. According to Söderberg (2017, 130), both the drug market and the software market are framed by conflictual relations. Söderberg (2010) also formulates the problem in terms of antagonistic relationships. In his analysis on misusers of technology – namely, hackers, crackers, and filesharers – he describes how antagonistic relationships emerge from the division between users and misusers made by legal systems and how these asymmetric relationships foster innovation. Guerrero-C (2019, 89) picks up this thread to analyze the evasion/interdiction antagonistic relationships between smugglers and law enforcement agencies adding the notion of co-evolution to explain the way socio-technical systems influence each other.

This thematic cluster offers the opportunity to understand innovations as they co-evolve with control mechanisms or in relation with other technologies, where local practices combine different material and cultural resources to operate, that is to say, the production and practice of technologies in illegal settings as a theme on its own. We are pleased to introduce the following articles:

Scott in Microsoft’s drug dealer: digital disruption and a corporate conversion of informal improvisation explores the surprising ways in which a multinational corporation is connected with the local knowledge produced in the Brazilian favelas; in doing so, such knowledge is re-tooled to allow such powerful organizations to gain influence. Ake-Kob in Goffman and the Mafia: shaping YouTube's technological affordances in the war on drugs combines Goffman’s strategic interactions theory with Pinch’s concept of co-presence to interpret the use of YouTube by the drug trafficking organizations in their Mexican turf wars. Carenzo in Contesting informality through innovation “from below”: epistemic and political challenges in a waste pickers cooperative from Buenos Aires analyzes Argentinian informal recyclers as innovative actors with their own technological devices and pedagogical practices. He offers a new perspective on a topic normally thrown aside, providing epistemological justice and recognition to the waste pickers for their social and environmental contributions. Pardo-Pedraza in Artefacto Explosivo Improvisado: landmines and rebel expertise in Colombian warfare addresses material, technical, and political nuances of improvised antipersonnel landmines constructed/used by Colombian-armed groups. She refers to the irregular creativity and ingenuity needed to construct improvised landmines as rebel expertise, a particular knowledge opposed to technocratic, and standardized expertise of humanitarian demining organizations. Finally, Spinardi, Cooper-Knock, and Rush in Proximal Design in South African Informal Settlements: Users as Designers and the Construction of the Built Environment and its Fire Risks reconsider the concept of proximal design, proposed by Usenyuk, Hyysalo, and Whalen to analyze forms of mobility in Siberia. Based on the challenges for fire safety in the informal construction of South African settlements, they argue that proximal creativity is not always fully adequate for local needs and that broader social contexts or relevant social groups should be considered to expand the perspective of local design.

We would like, finally, to invite more scholars to visit the gray zones of innovation.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on contributors

Óscar Moreno-Martínez holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Edinburgh (UK), and a MSc in History of Science, Technology, and Medicine from Imperial College London (UK). He is currently a lecturer at the Language and Communication School at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Colombia).

Javier Guerrero-Castro is a Colombian sociologist. He holds an MSc by Research and a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the University of Edinburgh (UK). He is currently a lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities, STS+I master's, Instituto Tecnológico Metropolitano (Medellín, Colombia).