“I think you should explore the kinky market”: How entrepreneurs develop value propositions as cocreated networked objects”

The first paper from Clay Spinuzzi – “I think you should explore the kinky market”: How entrepreneurs develop value propositions as cocreated networked objects” – will pursue the movement that Engeström started 25 years ago by arguing that work historically developed away from craftwork, bureaucracies, and markets toward multi-professional networks. The paper does so by focusing on open-ended, creative, multi-disciplinary teams—such as entrepreneurs pitching their technologies to potential stakeholders— where the activity network’s object is hard to define. Spinuzzi will argue that since the object is the “sensemaker” (Kaptelinin 2005), the focal point that defines the activity system, an indeterminate, fragmented, or multiple object inevitably poses problems for defining a case’s unit of analysis. He will explore how to pin down that unit through his examination of an empirical case of how an entrepreneur cocreates such an object, a value proposition, with an audience of stakeholders. Through this case Spinuzzi first, reexamines three activity-theoretical tenets of the object: it is a “sensemaker,” it is both objective and projective, and it is cyclically transformed and second, suggests how these tenets might help us better understand cocreated networked objects.