Entrepreneurs of Chaos? From Disruptive Innovation to Negentropic Entrepreneurship | 19.-20.05.2025
Research conference, 19-20 May 2025, Lüneburg, Germany
Host: Research Initiative on the Disruptive Condition
Organizers: Igor Galligo, with Elke Schüßler, Matthias Wenzel and Erich Hörl
Deadline for abstracts: 1̶0̶ ̶J̶a̶n̶u̶a̶r̶y̶ ̶2̶0̶2̶5̶ Extension until 19 January 2025
Call for Applications: Download Call for Applications
The Purpose
This two-day symposium, comprising a day of lectures and a day of workshops, aims to draw up a radical critique of the ideology of disruption and impact, which is currently dominating the thinking and practices of technological innovation and entrepreneurship by drawing on the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, but also by going beyond it. Stiegler has argued that the current polycrisis situation can be understood as an increase of entropy in various forms: physical, biological, social, and psychological. Originally developed in the context of thermodynamics, the physical concept of entropy refers to the degradation of energy in a system to a non-usable state, implying a tendency towards disorganization and disorder. Life, however, strives towards negative entropy, i.e., the accumulation and maintenance of energy. Following this notion, Stiegler and others work with the notion of negentropy, a new word creation expressing the idea of negative entropy. Against this background, this symposium aims to bring together entrepreneurship and innovation scholars with contemporary philosophy to, first, develop a critique of the concepts of disruption and impact in the context of (technological) innovation and entrepreneurship and, second, develop an alternative model of technological innovation and entrepreneurship that considers economic, social, cultural, and ecological balances. Thus, we wish to discuss and develop a negentropic conception of entrepreneurship that is contributory to social and ecological well-being, foregrounding construction, creation and transformation rather than disruption, exploitation and degeneration as central features of contemporary entrepreneurship.
The Organizing Committee
Erich Hörl, Elke Schüßler, Igor Galligo, Matthias Wenzel
Event Discription
Duration: 1-day and half conferences and half a day of workshops
Date and time: May 19 and 20, from 9. a.m. to 7 p.m
Location: Leuphana University, Lüneburg
Fields of research: Philosophy, management and organization studies, economics, political science.
Language of the symposium: The conference and the workshops will be exclusively in English.
Structure of the conference: The program of the symposium includes 4 sessions of talks on the first day of the symposium, 2 sessions of talks on the second day and 2 sessions of workshops on the second day.
The Organizing Scientific Institutions
Leuphana Research Initiative: The Disruptive Condition
The Scientific Partners
Leuphana Center for Critical Studies
Leuphana Center for Organization and Social Transformation (LOST)
The Argument
‘Disruptive innovation’ and ‘impact innovation’ are two expressions that have become central to the rhetoric of contemporary entrepreneurship, expressing a desire to transform the world of innovation, and with it the world itself. In basic terms, innovation can be defined as the introduction of a product, process, service or business model that is new or significantly improved. An innovation is disruptive if it breaks and replaces established technologies, institutions, or practices in ecological, economic, social, and cultural fields. This quality is reinforced by the term impact, which expresses the forcefulness or even violence by which these transformations are brought about.
At the same time, it has become undeniable that innovation, when it generates a successful impact, also disrupts the balance of the natural, artificial and social ecosystems that precede it, without necessarily rebuilding them afterward. But isn’t that the very goal of any impact? ‘Impact’ is also used in military language to describe the explosion produced by a projectile weapon (bomb, missile) targeting human structures. Can we infer from this terminology that innovation sees ecological, economic, social and cultural fields as territories to be destroyed in order to conquer them, as part of an economic war? If this is the case, then we must acknowledge that the entrepreneurial ideology of disruption inherently links innovation with destruction. It draws not only from the economic thought of Joseph Schumpeter through his concept of Creative Destruction, but also that of the conservative economist Milton Friedman and the Chicago School, whose Shock Doctrine Noami Klein sees as a driver of ‘disaster capitalism’ in her book of the same name: This is now the preferred method for helping private enterprise to achieve its objectives [summarizes Noami Klein]: taking advantage of collective trauma to implement major economic and social reforms’.
This ideological legacy is now, according to Stiegler, being reformulated and extended through a strategy of technological shock: “It is much more widely technology that has been used, particularly since the conservative revolution of which Milton Friedman was the main ideologue, to create shock and destruction, psychological as well as social and economic.” This entrepreneurial strategy - whose technological model is crystallizing in particular today in Silicon Valley, under the libertarian influence promoted by Peter Thiel - is reminiscent of the incantations to sow chaos in modern societies espoused by the Daesh terrorist doctrine, with which Stiegler dares a polemical analogy, presenting the celebration of disruption as ‘a new form of barbarism’. From this perspective, the ideology of disruptive innovation does less to upset the history of design than it does to explode the various balances, articulations and ecosystems of a society and/or the Earth system. The result is a general increase in entropy rates as a measure of disorder, as well as economic and social violence – as demonstrated by the economist Nicholas Georgescu Roegen, and illustrated by Giuliano da Empoli in his book ‘The Engineers of Chaos’ – through a techno-political analysis of the development of Italian digital populism from the 2010s.
Against this background, disruption results from the fact that the speed at which innovation is spreading throughout our societies and our planet at a frantic pace is far greater than the speed at which the social and natural systems they are designed to evolve. Disruption thus extends to all natural and artificial systems, from the family to natural regeneration processes, including businesses, languages, law, economic rules, taxation and so on. The misalignment between the evolution of the technical system and the evolution of social and natural systems is nothing new, dating back to the first industrial revolution. However, today these technical transformations are so rapid, so massive and so pervasive that they are outpacing the political, social and ecological spheres, with the result that no new model of development that is viable in the long term can be reconstituted. Regulation, legislation and knowledge always arrive too late in their attempts to assimilate innovation: the resulting constant extension of legal and theoretical vacuums is without historical precedent.
In addition, the disruptive impact destroys not only Western societies, environments, and minds, but also societies and minds of the Global South, when innovation is exported by Big-tech to extra-Western markets. There is therefore a double impact, both historical on previous models, circuits and standards, and cultural, as a form of colonizing. When projects disrupt the techno-diversity developed over decades, even centuries, by local cultures to replace them with technologies implementing Western cultures, disruptive innovation is part of a fierce globalization, under the guise of modernization and design. This is the case, with the cultural upheavals brought about by the American dating industry in large Indian megacities, which in 15 years has wiped out centuries of Indian cultures on encounters, among the middle and wealthy classes. The reaction of some is to want to duplicate the Californian model of Silicon Valley in other regions of the world. In India for example, where some dream of seeing Bangalore as the technological capital and spearhead of an Indian Silicon Valley. But not only do the applied entrepreneurial processes remain the same, but also the designs remain largely inspired by Western fashion. Disruption has not only become a global entrepreneurial model, but also a lifestyle brought by and for Western modernity.
The aim of this symposium is to develop a critique of the ideology of disruption and to formulate new entrepreneurial principles and procedures that will enable each invention to be re-articulated with the reconstruction of new psychosomatic, socio-technical and socio-cultural, as well as ecosystemic balances. To do this, we propose to replace the entrepreneurial strategy and ideology of disruption. But how could a different, an essentially negentropic entrepreneurial model look like? We propose, as a first hint, to think about Stiegler’s notions of bifurcation and transindividuation .
In physics and biology, negentropy (or negative entropy) refers to a measure of order and organization in a system or organism. It is thus opposed to entropy. Negentropy represents the useful and structured energy available in a system to carry out work and in an organism to ensure its survival. It is used to describe the capacity of an organism to maintain its internal order in the face of the increasing entropy of the universe, which dissipates vital energy. Thus, if a living organism produces entropy by transforming energy [into resources for its survival], it maintains its anti-entropy by constantly creating and renewing its organization, and it produces anti-entropy by generating organizational novelties.’
Bifurcation – a term that originally comes from the theory of non-linear equations, catastrophe theory and systems theory, is used here to denote something like forking paths, but also the uncertain and open character of evolution – refers to an operation: a systemic change in the collective choices made, more rapidly and more radically than transition (because it is opposed to progressive or gradual change), but less violently than disruption (which advocates a total break with previously established socio-economic and/or ecological orders). In this sense, bifurcation does not imply a rupture, but a radical reorientation in the evolution of the structures of an organization or organism.
In the social sphere, and extending Bertrand Gille's intuitions, Stiegler proposes thinking about the production of negentropy through the formation of circuits of transindividuation: ‘Bertrand Gille held a different point of view from that of the new barbarians: if innovation does indeed disrupt an ‘established order’, it is only successful if it establishes a new order or another metastability – i.e. new circuits of trans individualization – and not a state of shock and permanent chaos reflected in a “chronically unfrozen” system or organization manipulated to their advantage by strategists advocating permanent and unlimited innovation.’
For Stiegler, the transindividual is what, through the co-individuation of I's, generates the transindividuation of a WE. This process of transindividuation takes place under the conditions of metastabilization made possible by what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon calls the pre-individual milieu, which is assumed by all individuation processes and shared by all individuals. For us today, however, this pre-individual milieu is intrinsically technological. Technology is thus the ‘third strand’ of individuation, which in turn constitutes transindividuation. Transindividuation is what is achieved through the circuits of transindividuation, that is, through the relations that weave society through the intermediary of individuals and the artificial media of mediation that all technology constitutes. While transindividuation is essentially a social process, we also need to think about it in association with natural milieux and ecosystems, and in this sense move towards a broader and more comprehensive conception of negentropy.
How can entrepreneurship appropriate the concepts of bifurcation and transindividuation circuits to develop and promote a model of negentropic entrepreneurship? What principles can entrepreneurship research formulate on the basis of these concepts? How can entrepreneurial innovation and success be re-considered as negentropic processes that must be part of an articulated and creative understanding and configuration of economic and technological fields, as well as social, economic, cultural and ecological fields? And what processes can it implement? Our two-day event aims to provide a symposium for generating and discussing answers to these critical as well as prescriptive questions.
The first day, open to the public, will be devoted to a series of lectures and discussions designed to clarify and define the scientific concepts and issues at stake. The second day, which will be closed to the public, will consist of collective workshops divided into six groups with the aim of formulating positive proposals aimed at defining not only the principles, but also the criteria and production processes of this negentropic entrepreneurship.
The Program
First Day : Talks
Opening 09.00 – 09.15: Erich Hörl, Elke Schüssler and Igor Galligo
1st Session: Impacting social and economic fields: the warlike logic of disruptive innovation
9.20 – 9.40: 1 talk:
9.50 – 10.15: 2nd talk:
10.20 – 10.30: Discussant:
10.30 – 11.00: collective discussion with the audience
Break of 20 minutes
2nd Session: The libertarian turn of entrepreneurship against institutions, organizations and ecosystems.
11.20 – 11.45: 1 talk:
11.50 – 12.15: 2nd talk:
12.20 – 12.30: Discussant:
12.30 – 13.00: Collective discussion with the audience
Lunch Break (buffet) of 1 hour and 30 minutes
3rd Session: The technological cause of entropy
14.30 – 14.55: 1 talk:
15.00 – 15.25: 2nd talk:
15.30 – 15.40: Discussant:
15.40 – 16.10: Collective discussion with the audience
Break of 30 minutes
4th Session: Disruption and neo-colonialism. The “Indian Silicon Valley” under debate.
16.40 – 17.05: 1 talk:
17.10 – 17.35: 2nd talk:
17.40 – 17.50: Discussant:
17.50 – 18.20: Collective discussion with the audience
Dinner at 8.00 pm with all the speakers.
Second Day: Talks and Workshops
Re-opening 9.00 am – 9.05 am: Erich Hörl
5th Session : Post-colonialism and Disruption. What lessons can we learn from alternative entrepreneurial experiences in the Global South ? The case of India.
09.10 – 09.35: 1 talk:
09.40 – 10:05: 2nd talk:
10.10 – 10.20: Discussant:
10.20 – 10.40: collective discussion with the audience
Break of 20 minutes
6th Session : How can entrepreneurs become actors of negentropy? (Bifurcation, Contribution and Transindividuation)
11.00 – 11.25: 1 talk:
11.30 – 11.55: 2nd talk:
12.00 – 12.10: Discussant:
12.10 – 12.30: Collective discussion with the audience
Lunch Break (buffet) of 1 hour and 30 minutes
First Workshop: Thinking negentropic entrepreneurship: Model and criteria of transindividuation
14.00 – 15.20: 4 simultaneous workshops
15.25 – 15.55: Presentation of the results by the 4 teams (7 minutes by team)
16.00 – 16.20: Collective discussion with the audience
Break of 20 minutes
Second Workshop: Designing negentropic entrepreneurship: Process of transindividuation
16.40 – 18.00: 4 simultaneous workshops
18.05 – 18:35: Presentation of the results by the 4 teams (7 minutes by team)
18.40 – 19.00: Collective discussion with all the participants
19:00: Cocktail with all the participants
