Mobilizing to Advance Creative Projects: NewCar’s Prototype Parts Purchasing Activity
This chapter illustrates the BKAP model through an extended ethnographic case to show how network and knowledge processes interact to produce project-based innovation. An ethnographic case study in the same automotive setting found in Chapter 4 illustrates the emergence of creative projects launched in pursuit of innovation. Specifically, this chapter depicts how an automobile manufacturer’s prototype parts purchasing routine contrasts with two creative projects undertaken to redesign it. The chapter elaborates how trajectory strategy, consisting of the trajectory projection and scheme, and trajectory management, consisting of knowledge articulation, brokerage activity, and an additional category emerging from the author’s field data—contingency management—impact the two projects’ adoption. To lay the groundwork for how the two creative projects emerged, the author describes the “cowboy culture” presented in the Introduction, a culture imprinted within NewCar that gave rise to behaviors through which creative projects were pursued.