Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

Chasing Innovation explores how India has developed the idea of entrepreneurial citizens as leaders mobilizing society and the contradictions that arise as designers, engineers, and businesspeople frame development and governance as opportunities to innovate. It 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. However, social, economic, and political structures constrain whose enterprise, hopes, and needs can be seen as worthy of investment, leading to the exploitation of citizens' social relations, empathy, and political hope by powerful investors, philanthropies, and companies.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 304 pages
\n Publication date: 12 March 2019
\n Publisher: Princeton University Press
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Can entrepreneurs develop a nation, serve the poor, and pursue creative freedom, all while generating economic value? In Chasing Innovation, Lilly Irani explores 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, showcasing how a global ethos of development through design has shaped 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, hopes, and 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 offers a critical examination of the promises and perils of entrepreneurial citizenship in India and beyond.

\n Weight: 532g\n
Dimension: 156 x 235 x 25 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780691175140\n \n