Presentation by Duncan Chapple and Professor Katy Mason at the 31st annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics.

1. CALCULATING AND ACCOUNTING
FOR THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION
PRESENTING:
DUNCAN CHAPPLE, EDINBURGH
& KATY MASON, LANCASTER.
COAUTHORS:
NEIL POLLOCK, EDINBURGH
NURGÜL ÖZBEK, HHS
NAJMEH HAFEZIEH, ROYAL HOLLOWAY
ANNA YANKULOVA, UCD

2. Ordering the perfect storm
• Intermediaries play a vital role in the creation of futures
• But what work is done in their production?
– How do vendors struggle to become ‘cool vendors’
– What happens when firms, or entire technologies, are found to
be obsolete
– How do those outside the intermediaries shape how the
intermediaries shape
– There is a plurality of contestations around the intermediaries
• Many contestants
• Many things being contested

3. Why framings matter: An example of a Gartner, Inc. Hype Cycle
Widely used to align
ideas about the future
• Enduring
‘furniture’ with
nested framings
This example, 2010,
is suggestive of
performative effects.
• E.g. real-time
temperature and
humidity
monitoring, as
one category,
forces M&A
while modular
electronic health
record systems
become obsolete

4. Accounting for the future of innovation
• The different roles of analysts in influencing the field
• How power is unevenly distributed across different
analysts in constructing categories
– different practices they are engaged in.
• Different elements of the frameworks shown in the
literature articles
– to dig out what the material demonstrates most

5. INTERMEDIARIES AS
CATALYSTS OF MARKETS
- WHERE MARKET ACTORS COLLIDE
- WHERE THEY CONTEST AND IMAGINE NEW
VERSIONS OF WHAT IS BECOMING
- WHERE FACTS AND FICTIONS ARE REASSEMBLED
AS ANTICIPATORY VERSIONS OF THE WORLD
- THE FACT AS “THE” STABILISED VERSION OF AN
AUTHORISED VERSION OF REALITY
- LEGITIMATION OF THE INTERMEDIARIES’ AUTHORITY

6. o HOWELLS, 2006
- TYPES AND FUNCTIONS
- WHAT BUNDLES OF PRACTICES
EXIST
- WHAT DO THEY TRY TO
ACHIEVE
o BESSY AND CHAUVIN, 2013
IF YOU CAN DISTINGUISH FORM
AND TYPE OF INTERVENTION OF
ACTORS’ EFFECT, YOU CAN
STUDY THE SOCIAL
ORGANIZATION OF MARKETS
KEY REFERENCES

7. Christian Bessy and Pierre-Marie Chauvin
Valuation Studies 1(1) 2013: 83–117
• “We show how intermediaries contribute
to define valuation through their different
activities and foster valuation frames that
can improve the coordination of actors,
but also reorganize the markets in
different ways.”

8. Methods
• Searches on ‘Cool Vendor’ documentation
• Reviewed several Hype Cycles, initially in the area of
health, to identify potential informants
• 17 semi-structured interviews with analysts involved in
producing Hype Cycles and similar devices at other
firms

9. What we looked for
1.
Function to
influence
the field or
mobilize
the market
2.
Category
construction
practices
3.
Comments
and
Exemplary
quotes
4.
Notes on the
characteristics
of the
valuation
frame &
Analysts’
resources

10. Indicative findings
# Function Category Quotes and notes
13 Knowledge
combination
and re-
generation
framing They talk to vendors and clients and then articulate the translation of what this
particular technology does for the market, what he calls ‘balancing the supply and
demand’. The challenge is to have analysts to cover what happens both in the network
(media) and IT.
13 Gate-
keeping
framing, (also
discriminating
across
emerging
categories?)
“If we don’t have some indication from the market place there’s demand for this, we
won’t cover it. -.. what matters most is what you need to do to pass it by existing
customers”.
14 framing,
discriminating
The quote refers to how they construct categories based on their revenue expectation:
“Decision to cover a category comes from the revenue expectations: market has to be
large enough that you can make MarketScape that is going to at least cover its cost or
grow fast – marketing dollars need to participate. .. (As an analyst) you are rating
firms, and out of ten firms, three or four are going to be rated highest. There is good
likelihood those firms are going to buy reprint rights.”
15 Information
processing;
Knowledge
generation
and
combination
framing,
experimenting
, validating
categories
“So we start to track a certain market. We create a new practice or community of eight
or ten analysts. Those eight or ten analysts create a first draft of the definition of a
certain category, and then we start to publish something based on the feedback from
the market and from the other colleagues across the firm. We refine that taxonomy
and after a couple of iteration it stands still for probably five or ten years with minor
adjustments. “

11. Discussion
• Bessy and Chauvin show a clear division of labour: intermediaries produce frames; market
participants consume them.
• However, our research finds that many frames are produced through collective, co-creative
processes of challenges: a plurality of contestations where leadership can be distributed
– Plural, in that the frames themselves are being challenged by the vendors and reformed in
conflict with them (e.g the creation, visualisation, and destruction of market categories)
– Contestations, in that vendors signal their acceptance or rejection of these emerging frames,
both through market demand and the self-interested amplification of these frames
• These frames, such as categories, are also bound to time: the ‘authorised version’ of the truth
includes the future expiry and subdivision of categories
• Unlike Bessy and Chauvin, we show the production of frames to be iterative, contested and
largely conducted ‘backstage’ while the ‘on stage’ diffusion of these frames is a dyadic
legitimisation process designed to stimulate the consumption of the new frames.
• A new didactive interpretive space, a new community of practice, and thus a new version of the
market are co-created in a moment which makes this frame performative, and allows the possible
to be become real

12. CALCULATING AND
ACCOUNTING FOR THE
FUTURE OF INNOVATION
PRESENTING:
DUNCAN CHAPPLE, EDINBURGH
& KATY MASON, LANCASTER.
COAUTHORS:
NEIL POLLOCK, EDINBURGH
NURGÜL ÖZBEK, HHS
NAJMEH HAFEZIEH, ROYAL HOLLOWAY
ANNA YANKULOVA, UCD