In postliberal India, what does Indigenous innovation look like? This question might appear to be simple on its face, but it signals a sea change in the discourses of social and technoscientific development from the end of British rule to our contemporary moment. Lilly Irani's ethnography, which took place over fourteen months in a product design and research studio in New Delhi, paints a rich portrait of design and development in postcolonial India. Chasing Innovation is set in the context of neoliberal economic reform, which was supposed to transform the economy, focusing on Indian entrepreneurs, whom Nehruvian approaches had supposedly stymied. As Irani's perceptive account reveals, postliberal India carved out a new place for Indian entrepreneurs, promoting their work to the level of a form of service undertaken by citizens on the promise of providing them with mobility and opportunities for “value creation.” The strength of these “entrepreneurial citizens” was India's diversity and the many communities marginalized in the country's pursuit of capitalist development.

Irani elucidates how the difference lived by India's subaltern “others” was identified as a source of value creation. In this respect, this book reflects the place of Indigeneity in the context of technological innovation in a globalized world that must necessarily navigate coloniality, neocoloniality, and sovereignty.Footnote ¹ India's poor engaged in jugaad, or craft. The task therefore entailed educated elites, working in privileged studios of design, recognizing and translating Indigenous innovation into in-person or Skype-based design presentations, incorporated as features of technology festivals and made the targets of crowdfunding (p. 174). This enterprise was as much techno-organizational one as it was moral, because these entrepreneurial citizens viewed themselves as both listening to and acting on the nation, indeed bringing forth its development energies where previous attempts had failed. Experimentation involves “learning through failure” by networking in workshops and lectures, as well as clubs, bookshops, and restaurants, which were recognized as the various forms—and sites—of productivity that privileged in situ and disruptive action. Such an orientation was a marked departure from the Nehruvian era, when officers in state enterprises would oversee initiatives in the hope of controlling the possibilities for failure or waste, which was read as managerial and institutional illegitimacy.

Irani's ethnography reveals how entrepreneurial citizenship differed from previous development initiatives. Large-scale changes were undertaken by individual clusters of interdependent actors feeding off the “speculative reality” of design innovation in postliberal India. In this context, failure was normalized, and the urgency of modernization, conceived in narrow European modularity under Nehru, no longer characterized “the ethos” of innovation (p. 12). Instead, design possibilities were explored, with close attention paid to the views of studio lay staff and rural communities in order to ground innovations. Working in this mode, uncertainty is elevated and imbued with new utility. Irani underscores the productive role of dissonance and incommensurability when creative workers attempt to work up an innovative idea into a scalable object—indeed, innovation can result in effective organizational dissonance, and in the Indian context, this may involve attempts to scale Indigenous craft.

To create true innovations, entrepreneurial citizens, in effect, objectify subaltern knowledge, which might often take the form of a workaround and thus play the role of inspiration for these entrepreneurs. However, to count such inspiration as innovation, it needs to be reinterpreted and modified so that it “adds value,” in large part because innovation is predicated on exchange. Thus, the workarounds that India's subalterns might brilliantly devise “became a resource out of which designers constructed opportunities in the overlap between people's existing practices, possible desires, and the goals and agendas of the designers’ clients” (p. 181).

Irani is reflective and critical of their informants, however, and as much as they perceptively describe the logics in and with which they work, they are honest about identifying the source of their self-importance. They note how such approaches to design reproduce caste, class, and gender hierarchies, among others, which exclude those who do not possess the habitus and linguistic registers to enter and tinker in the studio. Moreover, Irani sharply observes how the quest for Indigenous design reproduces inequality in the now cosmopolitan fields of neoliberal India. The horizon against which “design thinking” unfolds, which hones “the skills of empathy, optimism, experimental openness, and complex systems analysis” as a civic enterprise, is in many ways futurity, remarks Irani (p. 217). In this respect, I look forward to learning about Irani's coming analyses of how multiple and competing Indigenous futures might unfold as Indigenous scholars of genomics have underlined.Footnote ²