The politics of innovation, entrepreneurship and community as a discursive practice. Researching a startup incubator in Milan.

This study investigates innovation as a discursive field and it aims to answer the following research questions: under what conditions of possibility does the discursive practice “innovation” become subjectively and collectively sensible and meaningful? How does such discourse “speak the truth” to and for the subject? The research explores innovation as a meaningful social fact that, on one side, features ideal and objectified traits as an object of knowledge and, on the other, it socially inscribes itself into reality through spatialization. The analysis problematizes innovation as a social phenomenon that manifests itself in and through spaces –urban, organizational and corporeal, contingently to relational processes and subjective enactments. To answer the research questions, the study performs an analysis of innovation as a discursive field through a genealogical exercise that builds on an ethnographic observation conducted at Core, a startup incubator and co-working space located in Milan. The inquiry moves from the basic consideration that acknowledges as meaningful the relationship between innovation, the city and the urban space at large. Rather than assuming the “city-innovation” nexus as given, the study investigates some of the epistemological grounds, ontological properties and features of the rational discourse underlying innovation (Chapter 1). More precisely, this study begins with a problematization of how innovation is commonly thought and represented as requiring specific spatial conditions to thrive, and how a particular configuration of the object “city” is pre-reflexively implied and imagined when the desideratum “innovation” is evoked. Building upon this first genealogical analysis, the “eventualization” of innovation as a discursive practice is then investigated with reference to Milan’s contemporary social space (Chapter 3). In the chapter, particular attention is paid to key policies and initiatives embraced at the local and national governmental levels from 2011 to 2016. Building on the assumption that for a discourse to materialize into a social practice, organizational and corporeal spaces of configuration are needed, the results of the ethnographic investigation are then presented. The organizational spatial rhetoric and pedagogy are analyzed in order to shed light upon the material conditions of the appearance of the discourse of innovation (Chapter 4). Finally, the relational conditions of possibility for innovation to occur are explored, and the experience of being an “innovative” subject is investigated (Chapter 5). This study offers a contribution to critical social theory and research, as well as to human geography, in two ways. On the one hand, it performs a “methodological journey” to show how certain objects of thought e.g. the urban space, the city or innovation– territorialize in institutions, rituals, “banal” gestures, unconscious and pre-reflexive practices through spatial relations. On the other hand, this work sheds light on the rhetoric of innovation by arguing that it corresponds to a new anthropological discourse rather than being a simple expression of historically contingent economic necessities.