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

In this episode of the Anthropology in Business podcast, Angela VandenBroek speaks with Matt Artz about her career as a business anthropologist. The conversation covers Angela’s journey from consulting and studying innovation, to teaching applied anthropology at Texas State University.

At a Stockholm entrepreneur meetup, Per and Jonna pitched their startup, Forests, to venture capital investors (VCs), aiming to use crowdsourced data from forest enthusiasts to aid climate research. Despite a mission-focused presentation, emphasizing conservation and community impact, the VCs found the pitch unclear on how the app would be profitable. Throughout a year of field research in Stockholm's entrepreneurial ecosystem, I observed the importance of hype in startup success, which often clashed with Swedish cultural norms of humility. Hype, seen as necessary for engaging VCs, was frequently misunderstood as cynical or deceptive. Effective hype storytelling, however, involves credible projections of future success. While VCs focus on profitability, other potential allies might prioritize sustainability and community impact. The challenge lies in balancing these narratives to enroll diverse allies and rethink startup priorities beyond just rapid growth and profit.

The volume will offer an interdisciplinary, timely, and engaging view on artificial intelligence. It will offer a robust critique of these systems by a diverse range of scholars, while at the same time balancing the theoretical contributions with several discussions drawn from practical and applied settings.

This chapter will explore the often elusive connection between AI engineers' philosophies and epistemics and the software they develop—a relationship seldom examined due to limited access to engineers' reflective insights or the low salience of philosophical considerations in engineer’s work. I leverage the unique opportunity presented by Wolfram Research, a software company and research institute deeply intertwined for decades through the prolific work of Physicist Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram's extensive writings—spanning several books, his decade-long blog, and other public texts and talks, offer thick, deeply contextualized insights into his thinking. Despite not being a ubiquitous name in contemporary AI discussions, Wolfram Research and Stephen Wolfram have been at the forefront of AI development since the 1980s, with their products now integrated into many industries and technologies, including Apple's Siri, the Unity Game Engine, and ChatGPT. I provide a comprehensive analysis of Stephen Wolfram's philosophies of objectivity, complexity, and science within the context of Wolfram Research's history. Through participant-observation with WolframAlpha and Mathematica, their primary AI platforms, I examine how these philosophies manifest in the software. Furthermore, I conclude with a comparative analysis with feminist science and technology studies to challenge these taken for granted philosophies and offer an alternate reality where AI software could be more complex, more strongly objective, and more humanistic.

In this collection, we explore an entrepreneurial practice, innovation sandboxing—that is, to separate innovation practices into a safe, confined “play” space like a playground sandbox. Once moved outside the sandbox through a launch, release, or publication, innovation must contend with all the complexities of social life that cannot be wholly predicted or accounted for. Innovators, such as the entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers that appear in this collection, often find these complexities unsafe and damaging to innovation, leading to the rise of sandboxes to protect and nurture it.

We introduce this collection on "sandbox innovation," where innovative practices are separated and nurtured within a confined, risk-controlled environment, akin to a child’s sandbox. Originating in software development as a protective mechanism for experimental tasks, the sandbox concept has expanded to the entrepreneurial realm, offering a "safe space" for experimenting with new ideas. While such frameworks, including hackathons and incubator programs, foster creativity without the hindrances of real-world complexities, they also raise critical questions about the real-world applicability and responsibilities of innovations once they exit these controlled environments. This paper further explores the anthropology of entrepreneurship, revealing how sandboxing has become both an explicit and implicit practice within innovation ecosystems. Drawing upon various perspectives, the research calls for a deeper examination of the sandbox’s boundaries, emphasizing the need for ongoing, responsive innovation that takes into account the ever-evolving intricacies of social life and the broader responsibilities of real-world impact.

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.

Public pitching events at meetups, conferences, and competitions are promoted as a way to showcase curated entrepreneurs and provide insight into the pitching process and investors' perspectives. Attendees included aspiring and established entrepreneurs, investors, educators, mentors, and business agency employees. These events taught the audience how to effectively hype products, startups, and ideas, a skill deemed essential for entrepreneurial success. However, hype was a controversial tactic, often ignored and seen as a form of cynical aggrandizement conflicting with Swedish social norms. Despite this, hype was crucial for storytelling that attracted allies who could provide resources, advice, expertise, and networks. It acted as the connective tissue of entrepreneurial projects, yet its value was overshadowed by negative perceptions, diverting its use toward the interests of a few community actors, particularly VC investors.

In 2013, entrepreneurs, investors, and enthusiasts at the Hilton Slussen in Stockholm created the hashtag #SthlmTech to represent Stockholm's growing innovation ecosystem. This network joined other global hubs like Silicon Valley and London, supporting entrepreneurship and venture capitalism. With a high number of billion-dollar startups, SthlmTech gained a reputation as an innovative "unicorn factory." I spent a year conducting anthropological fieldwork in SthlmTech, observing and interviewing various stakeholders to understand the concept of innovation. I discovered that the ambiguity in "innovation" helps SthlmTech promote venture capitalist-driven entrepreneurship, redirecting the goals of aspiring entrepreneurs. I argue that innovation ecosystems are not neutral but instead perpetuate standardized forms of innovation that serve venture capital interests. To foster more flexible and impactful social change, I propose identifying and abandoning the current innovation culture in favor of more diverse and collaborative approaches.

The Curators of Sweden began in 2011 when two official governmental agencies, the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden, gave a Swedish citizen full and seemingly unfettered control of the official Twitter account of the Swedish government. Every week since then, a new Swedish citizen has been given access to write as @sweden, to curate Swedishness for the Internet. From this project, others have extracted the technology of #RotationCuration to develop similar projects, representing cities, states, countries and ethnic groups. However, in comparison to the Curators of Sweden, these #RotationCuration projects have been failures with small follower counts, minimal press coverage, and the inability to recruit curators. I argue that the reduction of the Curators of Sweden to its technology, i.e. #RotationCuration, is a form of technological solutionism that impoverishes our understanding of the project and is ultimately the reason behind the failure of #RotationCuration as a solution for democratic engagement with branding and group identity. To this end, I will contextualize the Curators of Sweden into the history of Swedish Modernism and Swedish nation branding that shaped the creators’ choices in design, development, and platforms to demonstrate the complex milieu that has led to @sweden’s success.