Innovation Culture: Aligning Invention, Change, and Promise in Stockholm’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Talk with Angela Vandenbroek.

This talk proposes “innovation culture” as a way of understanding how entrepreneurial ecosystems coordinate and manipulate entrepreneurial practices and decision making through the management of conceptual ambiguity. Drawing on ethnographic research in Stockholm’s startup ecosystem, I will examine how these ecosystems deploy the concept of innovation in multiple ways. Innovation is deployed both as innovation-as-invention—referring to the technical and material production of novel ventures, products, services, and markets—and as innovation-as-change, which emphasizes catalyzing shifts in social practice, meaning, and relations toward desirable futures. The slippages between the two are further obscured by innovation-as-promise—a promissory discourse that subtly conflates invention with change at key stages of venture development, aligning entrepreneurs’ ambitions for meaningful change with venture capital values and logics. I aim to demonstrate how innovation culture uncritically renders these alignments as immutable, even as many entrepreneurs experience growing dissonance between the promised futures of their ambition and the outcomes of their practices.