Rethinking Innovation: The Urban Perspective

Abstract

In one particular respect, this book is a rather tricky endeavor: It is dealing with many different notions that have been developed in the literature on companies and management; and it wants to effectively yield new perspectives on corporate activity. And yet, it is not a traditional management book. It aims at making certain aspects of the contemporary urban and cultural reality more understandable, hence hopefully producing concepts and methods that are not limited to the corporate realm. This is a cultural book just as much as it is a purely management-oriented work. This issue will become particularly obvious, and has to be kept in mind with particular insistence, in this chapter. For here, we deal with concepts that have a very close relation to management writing: the terms “innovation” and “resource”. Also, we will rely on one particular theory that comes clearly from the world of economic thinking. However, it has to be stated that I understand neither resource nor innovation as concepts limited to corporate actors. Rather, the strength of actor-network theory, and therefore hopefully also of this book, is that it creates concepts that are applicable to all kinds of cultural settings. The engagement of a company in a city is one – but only one – such setting.