Imagination, asset and risk: the performance of value in the Italian start-up food economy

In the '70s the spread of new technologies produced a fundamental transition in advanced industrial from a manufacturing-based to services-driven economy. In the Post-Fordist society (Arrighi, 1994) the socio-economic systems is based on the production, re-production and consumption of information and knowledge. New entrepreneurial organizational forms (Salamzadeh & Kawamorita, 2017) and various flexible labor practices and identities (Gandini, 2016) have emerged in the ‘Knowledge Economy’ (Powell & Snellman, 2004) thanks to the diffusion of the digital technologies. The importance of knowledge and flexible ways of cooperation make the intangible assets the core elements for the company's valuation (Arvidsson & Peitersen, 2013). In this context, start-ups emerge as new enterprise organizations which aims to develop a repeatable and scalable business model based on disruptive innovative products or services (Blank & Dorf, 2012). According to Ries (2011), a start- up is an institution designed to create a new product or service which operates within an extreme uncertainty environment where customers, markets, and other economic elements of businesses can be completely unknown. The whole system of venture capitalists, incubators and angel investors (Drover, 2017) guide new start-ups, monitoring the progress of projects and providing the new entrepreneurs of the necessary skills to communicate the idea in order to attract investments (Kanniainen & Keuschnigg, 2004). Indeed, the financial evaluation of the start-ups is not based entirely on marketed products or services, but in relation to future earnings (Birch, 2016). The first aim of this paper is to understand and assess to what extent start-uppers in Italian new food economy produce and articulate discourses about future economies in online and offline domain. Beckert (2013) argues that the economic actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future or fictional expectations. The fictional expectations in the knowledge economy take narrative form such as stories, theories and discourses. I intend to explore how start-uppers produce fictional expectation in order to create casual links that bridge the gap between the present and possible future economic developments and which type of economic behaviour they adopt according to these future economic projections. Since, the economic action takes place in the present but is directed towards the future (Mische, 2009) these representations are not confined to empirical reality, but also fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy (Bronk, 2009). Thus, the uncertainty about future states can be a source of innovation as a form of deviant behaviour, which is stimulated in the normative architecture of start-up economies encouraging deviant imaginaries, risk-taking economic behaviour (Neff, 2012), and the creation of innovative goods. Indeed, according to MacKenzie (2009), the economic accounting practices involve a process of interpretation which is not unambiguously or directly performative. Start-uppers scrutinize all possible alternative combinations and calculate the costs of all options. But as Langlois and Cosgel (1993) argue the distinction between risk and uncertainty (Knight, 1912) do not arise from assign a probability to an event, but from the initial classification of random outcomes. In this sense, risk requires judgment and intuition, rather than calculation. The second aim of the paper is to explore how start-uppers redefine ‘risk and uncertainty’ through the qualitative classification of all possible economic alternative combinations of the future events.  Furthermore, my objective is to understand how the communicative public actions become a central element in entrepreneurial governance as competitive immaterial resources trough which they transform their business ideas in attractive goods for possible investments. In these sense, the judgment about the quality of the start-up come before the choice to invest in it (Karpik, 2010). According to Callon, Méadel and Rabeharisoa (2002) the economy of qualities is structured on two procedures: the process of singularization, and the attachment and detachment mechanism. At the heart of these two procedures there are socio-technical devices which are created by economic actors to ensure the distribution of cognitive competences in order to perceive and evaluate the differences among products or services. Thus, qualities emerge as a process of qualification-requalification which aims to create a pattern of characteristics attached to the product for a specific time useful to transform it into a good to selling in the market. My intention is to focus on what kind of strategy start-uppers adopt in order to singularize (Callon et al., 2002) their start-ups and increase the financial valuation. Methodologically, the paper is based on the interpretative paradigm. In particular, I concentrate on the difficulties of studying a de-spatialised, individualised, highly performative and networked workforce of start-uppers. This subject of study challenges some traditional assumptions regarding the value of time-space coordinates of the fieldwork, and the very position of the researcher. Indeed, I refer to inventive methods as devices that ‘variously enable the happening of the social world – its ongoingness, relationality, contingency and sensousness – to be investigated’ (Lury & Wakeford, 2012: 2). The research considered the most important start-up ecosystem in Italy, which is based in Milan, Italy. I conducted 42 semi-structured interviews with different economic actors of the Italian food start-up scene such as food start-uppers, venture capitalists, angel investors, incubator managers and start-up community managers. I also conducted six months of ethnography following the work activities of start-uppers in different incubators and various events such as the Start-up Grind, the Start-up Crush Test and the FuckUp Nights. I also analyze the Twitter narrative production of Seeds&Chips2017, the most important Italian event on food, digital technologies and start-ups, adopting the digital method paradigm (Rogers, 2013). According to the findings, I suggest that the articulation of stories about future economic developments (Beckert, 2013) based on mental representations allows start-uppers and VCs in planning and organizing their economic activities. Furthermore, if the processes of singularization and attachment-detachment take place against a background of similitudes (Callon et al., 2002), it is possible to conclude that fictional expectations allows the attribution of qualities to start-ups enabling investors to recognize, evaluate and judge these properties in a co-operative dynamic. Thus, value is based on the ability to reduce the complexity though the development of economic futures following to the dominant logic of capitalist mode of prediction (Ascher, 2013). Moreover, If the distinction between risk and uncertainty concerns the initial classification of random outcomes (Langlois & Cosgel, 1993), I conclude that start-uppers intend to identify and colonize possible market niches, which before was unexplored, through the monopolistic competition in which markets are configured not as a whole, but as network of related markets, one for each start-up.