Introducing "Appetite for Innovation"

Appetite for Innovation

Creativity & Change at elBulli

M. Pilar Opazo

Introduction

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he backstage view of one of the world’s most intriguing restaurants looked like perfectly organized chaos. In elBulli’s kitchen, more than forty cooks coordinated in almost seamless ways to prepare a menu of thirty to forty courses that would be served that night, one of the last nights of the elBulli restaurant’s existence. On one side of the large kitchen, two head chefs were working on something that looked like a big balloon covered by a thin, white membrane. And, on the other side, an apprentice made small spheres and later dropped them with a spoon in a yellowish liquid. At the kitchen’s center was Ferran Adrià, elBulli’s chef and co-owner. Rather than supervising the cooking process, however, Adrià was insistently making notes and diagrams in several documents that were spread out on the bar and on a wooden table next to the kitchen. Supposedly, this is also where Adrià sat at least twice a week to test the consistency of elBulli’s menu. By the time of my visit, Adrià had already announced the unusual decision to close his successful restaurant to build a new research center for innovation under the name of “elBulli Foundation.”

As I watched how this scene unfolded, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. While a diner would probably have remarked on the meticulous preparation involved in each of elBulli’s “magical recipes,” from a sociological perspective, I was most intrigued by those seemingly insignificant yet systematic actions that make an organization’s production of innovation possible.

Introduction 2

I knew that in the last decades, elBulli and Adrià had not only created new food preparations, they had also become a key driving force behind the establishment of a new movement in the gastronomic field,1 often interchangeably called molecular, techno-emotional, or experimental cuisine by the mass media. Years earlier, along with Chefs Heston Blumenthal from Fat Duck, Thomas Keller from French Laundry and Per Se, and Harold McGee, who has written seminal books on the topic of science and cooking, Adrià had published a statement in the newspaper, The Guardian, advancing the principles of a “new cookery.” This approach, he announced, proposed culinary innovation in the form of new techniques, equipment, and new information in general, while building on the conventional knowledge of gastronomy.2 By the time of my visit to the elBulli restaurant, Adrià and elBulli’s presence was so significant in the gastronomic landscape that many chefs who were at the top of the culinary rankings had been trained in elBulli’s kitchen.

Further, by then anyone familiar with the latest trends in fine dining would know that, from 1997 to 2011, the elBulli restaurant had received the coveted recognition of three Michelin stars; and it had been declared the Best Restaurant in the World for an unprecedented five times by Restaurant Magazine, another influential culinary ranking. It was also common knowledge that interested diners would wait for years to be able to eat at elBulli. Roughly two million people wrote an e-mail every November to ask for a reservation at the restaurant, but only 8,000 diners got to eat there every season.3 The level of exclusivity at this restaurant seemed simply impossible in practice.

In some way, I had experienced this extreme exclusivity myself. In 2007, after six years of waiting, my parents received an e-mail offering them the opportunity to dine at this acclaimed restaurant. Months in advance, they had planned their vacation so as to drive from Madrid, where they lived at that time, all the way up to Cala Montjoi, the natural reserve in the province of Girona, Catalonia, where the elBulli restaurant is located. While in my home country, Chile, I remember receiving pictures of them sitting at one of the tables in the restaurant’s terrace, just a few steps above the beach, ready to start their meals. Back then, the food being served looked indeed quite intriguing, at least to the eyes of an outsider. As my mother said when she

Introduction

described one of the dishes that she had that night: “It was like an edible gold brooch . . . but one that exploded in your mouth while you were eating it!”

Despite the restaurant’s beautiful location and how stimulating the food was purported to be, back then I could not stop wondering how it was possible for reservations at a restaurant to be in such high demand, or for that matter, why potential clients would wait for years to be chosen to dine there. What was it about this restaurant elBulli? What was its secret?

By the time of the restaurant’s closure in 2011, it had also become unbelievably competitive for culinary professionals to work at elBulli as unpaid interns or apprentices. Every year 3,000 highly trained professionals from all over the world applied for a slot as a stagiaire, but only thirty or so were accepted. Part of the difficulty of getting a position at elBulli derived from the fact that the restaurant was open only six months a year, in order to dedicate the other six months to experimentation and creativity. Allegedly, this closing period enabled the restaurant to fully renovate its menu each year, presenting ever more exotic and ingenious creations to customers season after season. As a result, just as interested guests could not predict whether they would be chosen to dine at the elBulli restaurant, they were also not permitted to select what they wanted to eat once they had arrived there.

The mystical aura around elBulli was continuously reinforced by accounts of the restaurant’s leader, Ferran Adrià. For over a decade, the mass media has portrayed him as a genius, a visionary, and a sorcerer of cuisine. And, beyond cuisine, Adrià has been frequently compared to icons of creativity such as Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso. With no English skills, Adrià has traveled all over the world giving talks about innovation and creativity; and without holding a college degree, he had stepped into the academic world as the keynote speaker of a course being taught at Harvard University called Science and Cooking. After the first iteration of the course in 2010, the number of students who wanted to enroll in the class was so great that a lottery had to be designed to determine who would get to participate. Thus, just as at the elBulli restaurant, students were not able to predict whether they would be chosen to be part of the class or whether they would have to try their luck during a subsequent year.

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Introduction 4

Months prior to my visit to elBulli in 2011, Adrià had announced the transformation of his mysterious restaurant into a think tank of creativity, which would reopen in 2015.4 Yet, when reading about elBulli’s reinvention from my office at Columbia University, I had realized that there was something puzzling about this new organization too. Despite my efforts, I hadn’t been able to understand what the elBulli Foundation was going to be about—an interesting fact in itself. And when searching the Internet, I had come across the vast amount of historical records and detailed accounts of elBulli’s creations, which, for the most part, were made available by the organization itself. In fact, I would later recognize these records when observing Adrià’s preparation of one of his restaurant’s final meals.

Curious about all this and with the intuition that there was much to be learned from the workings of elBulli from a sociological and organizational perspective, I prepared a two-page document describing my interest in conducting research at elBulli. I sent it that same week to the elBulli team. To my surprise, I seemed to be among the lucky ones, because a few days later I received a reply that said something like this: “Thanks so much for your e-mail on Ferran [Adrià’s] behalf. We find your project interesting and we would like to know what we can do to help.”

In my first encounters with Adrià and his team, I tried to explain to them my interest in studying elBulli as an organization whose experience could inform practices undertaken by other organizations concerned with the production of innovation. I would soon find out that the moment I had chosen to conduct my research was particularly fortuitous, given that my fieldwork was going to take place precisely when the organization was undergoing its most radical transformation and elBulli’s members, especially Adrià, were themselves questioning and evaluating the structures that sustained the organization’s operation.

Later, when I started collecting narratives from professionals in the gastronomic field both connected and unconnected to elBulli, I noticed that, like the mass media, many of them used expressions such as “genius,” “visionary,” or “God-like” to describe Adrià’s qualities. Many of my interviewees, for instance, intimated that they believed Adrià “was able to see more than others

Introduction

can see” and attested to this by pointing out his “magical” or “extraordinary” capacities to create. As a sociologist, however, I was not interested in examining the psychological features of Adrià’s personality, or in writing a biography that detailed his personal life (which is in fact already available for interested readers). Instead, my goal was to consider elBulli as a case that can expand our knowledge of how innovation can be enacted by an organization and, in so doing, provoke changes in the larger system of which it is part. Accordingly, Adrià’s personal beliefs or motivations were interesting to me only as long as they unveiled aspects of the role played by a charismatic leader in sustaining innovation over time.

ElBulli was able to mobilize changes in the culinary field for over two decades, as we will see—changes that gradually percolated into other fields such as design, science, and technology. New culinary techniques and concepts developed by elBulli such as foams, frozen airs, spherifications, and deconstruction increasingly made their way into haute cuisine kitchens around the world. And, by the time the restaurant closed, elBulli had already entered people’s homes by marketing “molecular gastronomy kits” that offered the opportunity to introduce elements of elBulli’s cuisine into everyday meals. In addition to cooking techniques, organizational practices pioneered by elBulli had also spread into the high-end restaurant sector. Several recognized avant garde restaurants around the globe, for example, now have test kitchens or cuisine laboratories of their own, and also close for a defi nite period of time so as to fully dedicate their staff ’s energy to creativity.

How was it possible for a restaurant in the middle of nowhere to reach and have an impact upon the world that resided outside it? How did a selftaught cook with no English skills come to be recognized as an international icon of creativity and innovation? In some way, elBulli has managed to stay creative for several years and continued to captivate the public’s attention during its periods of intermission. This book analyzes the process through which this occurred, not only by illuminating the underlying factors that explain Adrià’s “visionary” capacities but also, and most importantly, by examining the processes and dynamics that enable an organization to produce systematic and radical innovation.

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Introduction 6

My investigation will make clear that while many good ideas may emerge from random creative sparks or from an individual’s talent, the relentless production of innovation cannot be explained only by this. The research will show that innovation that is able to enact changes in a field is rather the result of concrete and collective practices that make it possible for new knowledge to be understood, recognized, and legitimized by the public. The experience of elBulli will illustrate that institutionalizing innovation involves the construction of an organizing structure that is able to win the support of a coherent group of people that helps to disseminate and maintain a new cause.

To understand the processes behind elBulli’s production of innovation, I examined the organization’s history and the different factors, both internal and external to the organization, that enabled it to become an avant garde restaurant, and that allowed Adrià to be recognized as a worldwide icon of innovation. Tracing the organization’s past, as we shall see, was critical in understanding the organization’s present, as it offered possibilities to identify the patterns that explain elBulli’s growing trajectory. Moreover, instead of limiting my analysis to the internal workings of elBulli, I examined the organization’s interaction with the wider context of its operation, what organizational scholars refer to as the “institutional environment.” Th is involved including the views of people who had directly witnessed the inner workings of elBulli and, therefore, could provide me with insights regarding what was distinctive about the organization. It also required the inclusion of the perceptions of people who were not connected to elBulli and, hence, who could tell me about how the organization was able to reach and influence outsiders.

Given that the culinary field is multidisciplinary, I gathered narratives from a wide variety of participants in the contemporary gastronomic industry in two different yet interconnected sites: Spain and the United States, mainly Barcelona and New York, cities considered culinary hubs. My interviewees included current and former members of elBulli, elBulli purveyors and collaborators, and former elBulli apprentices, most of whom were chefs at renowned restaurants at the time of my interviews. I also collected narratives of elBulli’s outsiders including gastronomic critics, chefs, faculty members of culinary institutes, and food scholars. During my fieldwork, furthermore,

Introduction

I attended gastronomic conferences and events advertised as platforms organized for chefs and by chefs, and had exclusive access to the elBulli workshop and to original documentation while the new foundation was being constructed. For a detailed account of the data collected and the subjects who participated in the study, please refer to the Appendix.

In this book, readers will find that while words like “visionary” or “sorcerer” have been repeatedly used to describe the personality of elBulli’s leader, the organization’s methods for developing innovation are far from incidental. Rather, plenty of purposeful action is involved in making innovations effective within the organization and recognized by those outside it.

As is the case with every organization, at elBulli, specific practices were mobilized on the ground in order to reach the world outside its boundaries and, thereby, to consolidate its reputation within its field.

Ultimately, this book represents a journey into a puzzling organizational model that pushes itself to its limits. Readers will notice that, unlike other organizations engaged in the development of innovation, elBulli is not concerned with the production of final products or ser vices, but with encouraging permanent processes of discovery. For this reason, rather than reproducing successes, elBulli chooses to continue to innovate. To do this, the organization built a dynamic structure to sustain innovation over time. Th is study offers a close look into the vision of this innovative orga nization, and the social arrangements that were generated to make this vision effective in reality.

It explains the internal and external practices that were at play in the workings of elBulli, and that eventually mobilized the entire reinvention of the organization itself.

My work expands on existing accounts written about elBulli and Adrià in a number of ways. First, it constitutes an extensive analysis that goes beyond the organization’s limits (and of its leader’s individual capacities) to understand its functioning. It also expands sociological studies of haute cuisine by providing a new window of observation into the development of innovation in the gastronomic field, from the late twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is important, given that the culinary landscape has undergone significant changes in the last few decades. Among these is a

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Introduction 8

new role for chefs in society, a phenomenon usually called celebrity chefs—a category in which Adrià is considered an iconic figure. Moreover, nowadays recipes and culinary experiences at restaurants are widely circulated throughout the Web by food professionals, food bloggers, and food aficionados alike. Cuisine, thus, has become a topic prevalent in society, manifested in the growing number of TV shows related to food and the increasing number of books and magazines that focus on cooking from different perspectives. By providing an in-depth analysis of one iconic organization in the contemporary culinary landscape, this book offers a peek into the inner world of chefs, and thereby into some of the dynamics that encouraged the gastronomic revolution that has taken place over the last two decades.

Finally, this investigation proposes a new way to think about innovation that extends beyond the production of new ultimate products. Too often, innovation is examined by looking at an organization’s final outcomes (such as patents) and by analyzing the conditions that lead to those outcomes. The major concern of this book, instead, is to show how innovation can be systematically mobilized in and by organizing systems. In doing so, it attempts to unveil the concrete practices that enable new ideas to have a sustained impact upon a wider population.

The structure that I chose to orga nize the book reflects the different processes involved in the enactment of radical innovation, from envisioning and implementing, to socializing and legitimating. Chapter 1 sets the groundwork for understanding the origins of elBulli’s new ideas, and retraces the historical development of the orga nization prior to starting to propose new ways of doing things in cuisine. Chapter 2 examines the inner functioning of the orga nization by looking at how the vision of one individual was adopted by a group of creators who were all working toward a common goal. It also examines how teams, time, and space were managed at elBulli, and how the crafting of a “language,” accompanied by systematic documentation, became a central mechanism for sustaining innovation within the organization.

Chapter 3 deals with the social dynamics that made it possible for elBulli’s “new cuisine” to be understood and recognized by the gastronomic commu-

Introduction

nity. It describes the vehicles that were generated by the orga nization to stabilize a new basis of knowledge within its field. Chapter 4 examines the unintended consequences of the relentless production of innovation, its connection to the closure of the elBulli restaurant, and the need for the organization’s reinvention.

Finally, Chapter 5 engages with the ongoing construction of elBulli’s new organization, the elBulli Foundation. The transformation of the restaurant is used here as an opportunity to test and refine the practices found to explain the organization’s innovative capacity—from making new recipes, to making new organizational structures to innovate, to making an entirely new organization. The chapter also offers readers the opportunity to explore the uncertainty surrounding elBulli’s new project, and the limits of an orga nization’s search for radical innovation and endless reinvention.

In analyzing the case of elBulli as one that can expand our understanding of how innovation works, this book addresses a number of themes that are central to sociology and to the study of organizations in general. On the one hand, it offers a close look into the phenomenon of charisma by examining the orga nized efforts made to sustain an orga nization and its leader’s charismatic authority. On the other hand, from a methodological standpoint, my investigation can be used as a resource for the study of other extraordinary populations. Sociologists tend to be experts in studying the outcasts or the socially marginalized, but not to interview and study those who are recognized as extraordinary creative minds. Readers who have conducted fieldwork might anticipate that this is not at all an easy task. In my case, my bilingualism was an essential resource that helped me deal with this type of personality, which is often complex and unpredictable, and also to eliminate the mystery around Adrià and his team. On repeated occasions, I found myself speaking quickly and assertively, as I saw them do in their interactions, so as to get my ideas and questions across. Yet it was only when I started to act as a mirror for them (that is, to develop diagrams and maps similar to the ones they did to show how I saw their work) that they started to see me as a different kind of expert and, accordingly, to treat me as an equal and sometimes even as a confidant.

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Introduction 10

While my research is valuable in the ways indicated above, it also has a number of limitations that are important to outline. First, as a case study, it does not include any exhaustive cross-case comparisons, but only considers the experience of other organizations (such as restaurants) to unveil the specificity of the case under study. Nevertheless, there are numerous universes that, like elBulli, have been a central force in driving innovation within the gastronomic field and in other fields, examination of which would shed light on the fi ndings obtained from this study. Second, given that my goal was to understand how elBulli’s creations came to be recognized as innovations, the focus of my research is on success. I do hope, however, that my examination of the organization’s growth shows that favorable outcomes are neither necessary nor impossible for an organization’s development. Third, consistent with the ethnographic nature of my research, the analysis is restricted to the sites selected for the study and does not attempt to be representative of a general population. Thus, this book’s objective is not to provide definite answers that can be invariably applied to diverse contexts, but simply to offer insights for future studies and applications of innovation.

One final aspect that shaped this book and that I find important to share is that, during the course of my research, I was in constant interaction with different types of audiences: from academics to business professionals to chefs. While having these different audiences introduced additional complexity to the project, it also provided diverse and insightful feedback that greatly influenced this work. The writing style that I use is a reflection of this process. In my work, I try to avoid jargon as much as possible so as to make my analysis accessible to a wider readership, including people who are familiar with elBulli’s story and the maneuverings of the gastronomic field and those who are not, as well as people who are acquainted with sociolog ical theories and empirical approximations and those who aren’t. In keeping with this goal, I use copious quotations, pictures, and diagrams in the hope that they will better convey the richness of the world that I encountered while doing fieldwork. I also present a recipe of elBulli at the opening of each chapter. These recipes retrace the historical development of the orga-

Introduction

nization, and illustrate central arguments made throughout the book. In the end, I hope my study will provide readers with an opportunity to enter the workings of a mysterious organization, and to realize that if one looks closely enough, things might not seem that mysterious after all.

0.1 and 0.2 (top) Ferran Adrià at his restaurant, and (bottom) elBulli’s terrace during the restaurant’s last week of operation; Cala Montjoi, Roses, Catalonia, Spain.

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Introduction 12

A Brief Note on the Meaning of Innovation Innovation has become a fashionable term, widely used across disciplines and industries. Yet the widespread use of the term has rendered its meaning largely ambiguous. As a result, the term innovation is often used interchangeably with similar-sounding concepts such as change, entrepreneurship, or creativity. While there is a thin line that distinguishes all these terms, it is important to clarify it for the purposes of this investigation.5 Innovation is not equivalent to change; innovation corresponds to the capacity to drive change. Any living system, an individual or an organization, is in constant transformation and evolution. Living systems cannot avoid change. Innovation, however, does not refer to inevitable, innate change. It involves the purposeful action of mobilizing change. As such, it implies a decision-making process through which uncertainty is turned into risk, risk that comes with the responsibility of having decided.6 Like innovation, entrepreneurship is the capacity to drive the development of a given enterprise. Yet, while entrepreneurship is typically associated with business activities, the management of risk that characterizes innovation may or may not be oriented toward making a profit. In this sense, innovation represents a broader term that incorporates, but is not restricted to, entrepreneurship.

Finally, innovation is not equivalent to creativity. Creativity refers to the envisioning of original ideas, whereas innovation corresponds to the process through which new ideas are developed and implemented in practice.7 This distinction is important as it implies that not every creative process will necessarily lead to an innovation. Innovations must have a social impact and be recognized by a community. Therefore, even if there might be plenty of creativity involved in the creation of, say, a new mobile device, a new delivery system, or a piece of art, these products and ser vices are not innovations unless they have an effect upon a given audience.

The distinctions among these three terms are important for recognizing the case of elBulli as one that can expand our knowledge of how innovation

Introduction

works. The evolution of elBulli was marked by a series of turning points that led it to become a famous, avant garde restaurant. While some of the decisive moments in this organization’s development were intentionally conceived of or enacted by the orga nization, others were mainly the result of external circumstances. However—and here comes the organization’s agency in enacting change—these defining moments were actively mobilized or reinterpreted decisions that were made by elBulli, mainly by Adrià. Further, they were defined as decisions that coincided with or strengthened the organization’s ultimate goals.

In relation to the notion of entrepreneurship, in which every restaurant is in essence a for-profit venture, activities associated with creativity at the elBulli restaurant, which Adrià and his team conceived of as the core activity of the organization, were gradually decoupled from business activities. Consequently, the functioning of the elBulli restaurant per se was not directly associated with turning a profit. In fact, in its initial stages, the restaurant was not making enough money to pay its staff and, after gaining external recognition, the restaurant by itself was losing half a million euros per year.

Adrià considered profitability and creativity to be two distinct sides of the same body and used the metaphor of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to explain the relationship between the two.

Accordingly, during elBulli’s evolution, mechanisms were actively developed to keep profitability and creativity separated while, at the same time, nurturing each other.8 Ultimately, Adrià and his team were not solely idea men, but innovators.

As we shall see, the knowledge and practices that elBulli developed somehow managed to trickle down from the isolated mountains of Cala Montjoi to be used and expanded by professionals around the world.

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