Angela K. VandenBroek, PhD Anthropologist of Innovation (and all the hype that entails)

SthlmTech, Stockholm’s startup ecosystem, is famous for being an innovation hub that produces more billion-dollar startups per capita than anywhere else except Silicon Valley. This success, people within the community say, is down to the ecosystem of organizations and experts that facilitate the creation and growth of startups via a well-organized curriculum that guides entrepreneurs through the “business” of starting-up. In this article, I examine this understanding of the ecosystem as a neutral, smooth, and ordered apparatus for maximizing the speed and efficiency of innovation. Specifically, I challenge how this popular conception of the ecosystem conceptualizes expertise and experts as mechanistic components ready to be deployed along the path of entrepreneurs training. By analyzing the expertise of ecosystem experts in practice, this paper aims to demonstrate what the ecosystem curriculum foregrounds and what it obscures and how the ideas behind this curriculum shape much more than routine business procedure.

As a first-generation scholar, my ambitions have always necessitated a patchwork career in parallel to my anthropological education. From customer service through to web development, these professional experiences have been shaped by my growth as an anthropologist and vice versa. This chapter is a reflection, inspired by teaching applied anthropology students, that explores what I learned tacking between theoretical anthropology and applied anthropology and how this tacking became an intertwining praxis at the intersection of design, technology, and anthropology. First, I argue that anthropology is not a career path that can only lead down one of two divergent roads: “academic” or “applied.” Rather, it is a way of thinking; it is a critical and ethical commitment; it is an ability to sit comfortably with intolerable complexity of social life and make sense of it;; and it is a curiosity and engagement with anthropological conversations. Second, I outline a series of tactics for building a more productive and impactful anthropological praxis from this perspective. I contextualize these tactics as not merely ways to “get things done” but also as a way of testing, extending, and expanding anthropological understandings of design so that we may also “do some good.”

The post explores the evolution and current challenges of the concept of culture in anthropology. Originating from 19th-century definitions linked to civilization and Kultur, culture has been reshaped by figures like Tylor, Boas, and Levi-Strauss. Today, culture is seen less as a unified whole and more as contested and fragmented, influenced by postmodernity's challenges. Contemporary anthropologists navigate these complexities, some seeking stability in science while others explore interpretation and description. The debate over culture's role — whether it should remain central or be de-emphasized — persists, shaping how anthropology understands human societies in a world marked by flux and diversity.