Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India

The ethos of innovation and entrepreneurship, honed in high-technology firms, has colonized philanthropy, development projects, government policies, and even thinking about international diplomacy. Innovation competitions, hackathons, and corporate mythologies around figures such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs proliferate optimism that passionate dreamers can change the world. But do entrepreneurial approaches to innovation really serve social needs? In this talk, I trace the history of this entrepreneurial form of citizenship in India, from colonial times to the present. I offer case studies that demonstrate how innovation needs to change to prioritize the needs of people over elite companies and institutions. This talk is drawn from my book Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press).

Lilly Irani is an Associate Professor of Communication & Science Studies at University of California, San Diego. She also serves as faculty in the Design Lab, Institute for Practical Ethics, the program in Critical Gender Studies, and sits on the Academic Advisory Board of AI Now (NYU). She is author of Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India (Princeton University Press, 2019) and Redacted (with Jesse Marx) (Taller California, 2021). Chasing Innovation has been awarded the 2020 International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award and the 2019 Diana Forsythe Prize for feminist anthropological research on work, science, or technology, including biomedicine.