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Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India
A vivid look at how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and how people try to live that promise
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations.
Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor.
While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.
With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.
Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani shows the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. Irani documents the rise of "entrepreneurial citizenship" in India over the past seventy years, demonstrating how a global ethos of development through design has come to shape state policy, economic investment, and the middle class in one of the world's fastest-growing nations.
Drawing on her own professional experience as a Silicon Valley designer and nearly a decade of fieldwork following a Delhi design studio, Irani vividly chronicles the practices and mindsets that hold up professional design as the answer to the challenges of a country of more than one billion people, most of whom are poor.
While discussions of entrepreneurial citizenship promise that Indian children can grow up to lead a nation aspiring to uplift the poor, in reality, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, which hopes, and which needs can be seen as worthy of investment. In the process, Irani warns, powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies exploit citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope in the quest to generate economic value. Irani argues that the move to recast social change as innovation, with innovators as heroes, frames others—craftspeople, workers, and activists—as of lower value, or even dangers to entrepreneurial forms of development.
With meticulous historical context and compelling stories, Chasing Innovation lays bare how long-standing power hierarchies such as class, caste, language, and colonialism continue to shape opportunity in a world where good ideas supposedly rule all.
304 pages, Hardcover
Published March 12, 2019
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December 28, 2021
Lots of fascinating material here, although given both the scale of India and the attempted development attempts, it probably needed more evidence to bolster some of the criticism the author wants to make. For example, she criticizes the regime of "entrepreneurial citizenship" on the basis that it is apparently disconnected from what people say they want and as well as what would really help grassroot politics. But the only examples she provides are of the designers looking to make a water filtration system ignored how poeple largely seemed content with their water quality as well as feedback on how villagers wanted flouridation (because of some unspecified earlier internal decision), and how one hackathon's attempt to create a system to boost grassroot voices on parliamentary bills never came to pass. These are certainly intriguing, but hardly comprehensive, and so providing a lot more case studies at least to argue this more forcefully might have been helpful.
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Quotes from the book:
Introducing entrepreneurial citizenship
I call this economic and political regime entrepreneurial citizenship. Entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time. This book shows how people adopt and champion this ethos in India in the early twenty-first century, articulating entrepreneurship with long-standing hierarchies and systems of meaning. Entrepreneurial citizenship attempts to hail people’s diverse visions for development in India. desires citizens could channel toward oppositional politics. and directs them toward the production of enterprise. Elites, political and industrial, produce this ideology. It makes the most sense for India’s middle classes. those with access to institutional, capitalist, and philanthropic patronage and investment. Entrepreneurial citizenship’s language and social forms discipline political hope. As people, privately or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), pitch to funders, to innovation competitions, or to corporate partners, they have to articulate dissatisfaction and demands as “opportunities” in patrons’ interests. They monitor themselves, their relations, and their environments as terrains of potential. On these terrains, they look for opportunities to take on projects and redirect their lives to add value. These practices bend away from the slow, threatening work of building social movements; rather, people articulate desires to work for change as demos and deliverables. Calls to entrepreneurial citizenship promise national belonging for those who subsume their hopes, ideals, particular knowledges, and relationships into experiments in projects that promise value. Proponents of this form, often technocrats and capital investors, promise that everyone is potentially an entrepreneur, from the least to the most privileged. (2)
What made entrepreneurial citizenship palatable to elites
Design techniques and entrepreneurial metaphors traveled well because of what they promised and what they obscured. They married care for potential users with the legitimacy of Silicon Valley innovation and the making of services and commodities. They appealed to NGO workers, schoolteachers, activists, and elites alike as a form of rationality accessible to all – simply a “way of thinking that anyone can do,” as one teacher put it to me. The universality of this promise was possible, however, only by obscuring the very structural forces that produced the difference and inequalities design sought to remedy. Design improved the world by adding to it – adding initiatives, products, and options. Lost in the frame were questions of unequal starting points, uneven distributions, or reparation. It promised this additive transformation by intervening in desirable ways, rather than inconvenient or even objectionable ones. Design and entrepreneurship were linked practices; together they proliferated products, managed risk, and promised novel sources of value. As design and entrepreneurship became civic pedagogy, a model of management became a model of care, community, and speculative experiment. e skills of innovation and the skills of substantive citizenship were, in these formulations, one and the same. Entrepreneurial citizenship subsumed political desire into productive potential – the potential of speculative value production that blurred the economic, personal, and cultural. (55)
Gerald’s challenge to DevDesign drew on the logic of value addition. First, he worked to impose a particular ideology of value, the foundation’s, on the studio. The foundation already organized its activities by this ideology of value. What the world needed was not more books. What was valuable were business plans and management models, governance. And even more valuable were business plans and models that could be replicated elsewhere, extending the foundation’s claim to affect lives in the global South. This could also extend the studio’s claim on resources from the foundation. One had to justify how they added value. the foundation’s money, private budgetary oversight, contracts were involved. Even in the absence of direct pressures of capital accumulation. The articulation of value, then, was not only a descriptive task. It was the task of negotiating with clients and partners what role others would value and accept, and what roles would be unacceptable. (99)
To see people as consumers was a historically specific but widespread form of naïveté, a generalized kind of social category around which turned middle- class discourses about Indian citizenship, private industry expertise, and transnational development practice. Many anthropologists and sociologists
would have come ready to critique this formation, bringing to bear analyses of neoliberalism, marketization, privatization, and individuation of subjects in relation. By hiring designers, the foundation could focus not on the politics but on the technology design that could evade becoming the object of, political awareness, contestation, or even just disuse. What Erica called naïveté, freedom from the constraints of existing work and models, generated an optimism central to designers’ motivation and productivity. (158)
Mukta, Erica, and others at the workshop noted that naïveté enabled them to approach the field with an untrained eye, sensitive to the possibilities immanent in this place and moment that might be ignored by others. In new-age terms, designers trained in being present. Designers actually trained and taught this naïve form of perception, attentive to detail and wary of assigning value judgments that occluded users’ own values. is naïve eye promised to discern newly relevant features of the situation that suggested promising paths forward. In conditions of competition, these paths would be novel and unknown to competitors. This was more than simply bringing the fresh perspective of outsiders to development; DevDesign had worked on development projects for half a decade. This was a stance of privileging the concrete present, however naturalized by power, over intellectually mediated perceptions. It was an ideology of consciousness widespread in the design and entrepreneurial cultures that oriented toward Silicon Valley. (159)
On the inequalties that sustained design work:
Entrepreneurial citizenship shares a number of elective affinities with existing forms of middle-class politics in India. Narratives of design and entrepreneurship share a common structure, that of an achieving hero who is the leader, author, or initiator of a course of events larger than himself or herself. Understanding social change in this way elides the role of privilege and capital in making designers and entrepreneurs possible. Instead, entrepreneurial citizenship valorizes individual enthusiasm, energy, will, and leadership as the source of social progress. In doing so, it obscures at least three dimensions of how social change happens: the role of collective politics in social change; the role of social, cultural, and economic capital for political actors, and the violence and labors of producing social order. (78)
The free will designers pursued in the studio relied on the steady and reliable infrastructural labors of the service staff. Despite liberal efforts to recast innovation as collaboration, innovation always required others not quite equal to the collaboration, others not quite part of the scene. These others provided the devalued labor of social reproduction, manufacture, and the stabilization of infrastructures necessary for innovation work. Incorporating the service staff into the experimental life would destabilize the steady flow of food and drink, the freedom to focus on more highly valued tasks, and the conviviality of never having tonight about who would clean the common area. Free will relies on unfree labors. Nobody at the studio imagined that these infrastructural workers would one day become entrepreneurial citizens, freely contracting and moving according to their will. These workers were, rather, those who enabled entrepreneurial citizens to intensify their freedoms and production of value. They made possible the infrastructure, resources, and flows on which entrepreneurial citizens relied. (106-7)
Poor people, Melinda Gates told Wired, have “ingenious ideas about what would really help them.” But entrepreneurial innovators need more than ideas, even ones that come from poor people. They have to translate the interests of investors, manufacturers, and powerful institutions into forms desirable and acceptable to potential users. This is a far cry from shared control. This empathy for potential users does not imply responsibility to the other. It is an empathy that treats others’ lives as inspiration, expanding how companies, NGOs, and entrepreneurs see their own interests and scopes of action. It is an empathy that seeks to entice unruly users to behaviors preferred by development agencies and manufacturers. It is an empathy that seeks to work along with some habits and transform others. It is an empathy in service of the conjoined tasks of market development and development governmentality. (169)
Though champions of entrepreneurial citizenship claim that all lives and knowledge potentially add value, the burdens and labors of sustaining a claim to value are unequally distributed. (204)
-
Quotes from the book:
Introducing entrepreneurial citizenship
I call this economic and political regime entrepreneurial citizenship. Entrepreneurial citizenship promises that citizens can construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time. This book shows how people adopt and champion this ethos in India in the early twenty-first century, articulating entrepreneurship with long-standing hierarchies and systems of meaning. Entrepreneurial citizenship attempts to hail people’s diverse visions for development in India. desires citizens could channel toward oppositional politics. and directs them toward the production of enterprise. Elites, political and industrial, produce this ideology. It makes the most sense for India’s middle classes. those with access to institutional, capitalist, and philanthropic patronage and investment. Entrepreneurial citizenship’s language and social forms discipline political hope. As people, privately or through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), pitch to funders, to innovation competitions, or to corporate partners, they have to articulate dissatisfaction and demands as “opportunities” in patrons’ interests. They monitor themselves, their relations, and their environments as terrains of potential. On these terrains, they look for opportunities to take on projects and redirect their lives to add value. These practices bend away from the slow, threatening work of building social movements; rather, people articulate desires to work for change as demos and deliverables. Calls to entrepreneurial citizenship promise national belonging for those who subsume their hopes, ideals, particular knowledges, and relationships into experiments in projects that promise value. Proponents of this form, often technocrats and capital investors, promise that everyone is potentially an entrepreneur, from the least to the most privileged. (2)
What made entrepreneurial citizenship palatable to elites
Design techniques and entrepreneurial metaphors traveled well because of what they promised and what they obscured. They married care for potential users with the legitimacy of Silicon Valley innovation and the making of services and commodities. They appealed to NGO workers, schoolteachers, activists, and elites alike as a form of rationality accessible to all – simply a “way of thinking that anyone can do,” as one teacher put it to me. The universality of this promise was possible, however, only by obscuring the very structural forces that produced the difference and inequalities design sought to remedy. Design improved the world by adding to it – adding initiatives, products, and options. Lost in the frame were questions of unequal starting points, uneven distributions, or reparation. It promised this additive transformation by intervening in desirable ways, rather than inconvenient or even objectionable ones. Design and entrepreneurship were linked practices; together they proliferated products, managed risk, and promised novel sources of value. As design and entrepreneurship became civic pedagogy, a model of management became a model of care, community, and speculative experiment. e skills of innovation and the skills of substantive citizenship were, in these formulations, one and the same. Entrepreneurial citizenship subsumed political desire into productive potential – the potential of speculative value production that blurred the economic, personal, and cultural. (55)
Gerald’s challenge to DevDesign drew on the logic of value addition. First, he worked to impose a particular ideology of value, the foundation’s, on the studio. The foundation already organized its activities by this ideology of value. What the world needed was not more books. What was valuable were business plans and management models, governance. And even more valuable were business plans and models that could be replicated elsewhere, extending the foundation’s claim to affect lives in the global South. This could also extend the studio’s claim on resources from the foundation. One had to justify how they added value. the foundation’s money, private budgetary oversight, contracts were involved. Even in the absence of direct pressures of capital accumulation. The articulation of value, then, was not only a descriptive task. It was the task of negotiating with clients and partners what role others would value and accept, and what roles would be unacceptable. (99)
To see people as consumers was a historically specific but widespread form of naïveté, a generalized kind of social category around which turned middle- class discourses about Indian citizenship, private industry expertise, and transnational development practice. Many anthropologists and sociologists
would have come ready to critique this formation, bringing to bear analyses of neoliberalism, marketization, privatization, and individuation of subjects in relation. By hiring designers, the foundation could focus not on the politics but on the technology design that could evade becoming the object of, political awareness, contestation, or even just disuse. What Erica called naïveté, freedom from the constraints of existing work and models, generated an optimism central to designers’ motivation and productivity. (158)
Mukta, Erica, and others at the workshop noted that naïveté enabled them to approach the field with an untrained eye, sensitive to the possibilities immanent in this place and moment that might be ignored by others. In new-age terms, designers trained in being present. Designers actually trained and taught this naïve form of perception, attentive to detail and wary of assigning value judgments that occluded users’ own values. is naïve eye promised to discern newly relevant features of the situation that suggested promising paths forward. In conditions of competition, these paths would be novel and unknown to competitors. This was more than simply bringing the fresh perspective of outsiders to development; DevDesign had worked on development projects for half a decade. This was a stance of privileging the concrete present, however naturalized by power, over intellectually mediated perceptions. It was an ideology of consciousness widespread in the design and entrepreneurial cultures that oriented toward Silicon Valley. (159)
On the inequalties that sustained design work:
Entrepreneurial citizenship shares a number of elective affinities with existing forms of middle-class politics in India. Narratives of design and entrepreneurship share a common structure, that of an achieving hero who is the leader, author, or initiator of a course of events larger than himself or herself. Understanding social change in this way elides the role of privilege and capital in making designers and entrepreneurs possible. Instead, entrepreneurial citizenship valorizes individual enthusiasm, energy, will, and leadership as the source of social progress. In doing so, it obscures at least three dimensions of how social change happens: the role of collective politics in social change; the role of social, cultural, and economic capital for political actors, and the violence and labors of producing social order. (78)
The free will designers pursued in the studio relied on the steady and reliable infrastructural labors of the service staff. Despite liberal efforts to recast innovation as collaboration, innovation always required others not quite equal to the collaboration, others not quite part of the scene. These others provided the devalued labor of social reproduction, manufacture, and the stabilization of infrastructures necessary for innovation work. Incorporating the service staff into the experimental life would destabilize the steady flow of food and drink, the freedom to focus on more highly valued tasks, and the conviviality of never having tonight about who would clean the common area. Free will relies on unfree labors. Nobody at the studio imagined that these infrastructural workers would one day become entrepreneurial citizens, freely contracting and moving according to their will. These workers were, rather, those who enabled entrepreneurial citizens to intensify their freedoms and production of value. They made possible the infrastructure, resources, and flows on which entrepreneurial citizens relied. (106-7)
Poor people, Melinda Gates told Wired, have “ingenious ideas about what would really help them.” But entrepreneurial innovators need more than ideas, even ones that come from poor people. They have to translate the interests of investors, manufacturers, and powerful institutions into forms desirable and acceptable to potential users. This is a far cry from shared control. This empathy for potential users does not imply responsibility to the other. It is an empathy that treats others’ lives as inspiration, expanding how companies, NGOs, and entrepreneurs see their own interests and scopes of action. It is an empathy that seeks to entice unruly users to behaviors preferred by development agencies and manufacturers. It is an empathy that seeks to work along with some habits and transform others. It is an empathy in service of the conjoined tasks of market development and development governmentality. (169)
Though champions of entrepreneurial citizenship claim that all lives and knowledge potentially add value, the burdens and labors of sustaining a claim to value are unequally distributed. (204)
July 20, 2019
A really excellent book. Lots of material for self-reflection if you are someone who does human-centered design. The profile of DevDesign is loving but critical, and does a good job of laying out the limitations imposed upon them by the structures in which they operate.
July 8, 2025
The ethos of liberal development is picked at and examined in this book on practical and sociological grounds. I appreciated how smoothly narrative folded into analysis and theory. The right analyst could run for miles with Irani’s concepts.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews