Market Innovation as Framing, Productive Friction and Bricolage: An Exploration of the Personal Data Market

This paper explores the possibilities offered by recent Science and Technology Studies (STS) research on markets for engaging with market innovation. Although there exist few reflections on how innovation happens in markets, market innovation has not been singularly theorized in STS-inspired market studies. In this paper, we explore the potential analytic utility of different sets of ideas in the field of market studies, such as ‘framing’ [Callon, M. (1998) ‘Introduction: the embeddedness of economic markets in economics’, in The Laws of Markets, ed. M. Callon, Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 1–57; Callon, M. (2007) ‘An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social’, Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 7–8, pp. 136–163], ‘productive friction’ [Stark, D. (2009) The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ] and ‘bricolage’ [MacKenzie, D. & Pardo-Guerra, J. P. (2014) ‘Insurgent capitalism: Island, bricolage and the re-making of finance’, Economy and Society, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 153–182]. Drawing on our research into the online personal data industry and start-ups developing personal data control products, we put together five sensibilities that we think are of use for broader considerations of market innovation.