Innovation and Embodiment in a Small Town Hotel

Innovators engage in activities that tend to absorb them body and soul. In Chapter 10 the authors walk through a typical day with an innovative hotel manager. Notwithstanding her training in the hotel trade, she seems to be in a constant dialogue with hotel rooms, furniture, buildings, and the urban surroundings. Facetiously, she claims to be using ‘whim as a method’. That, of course, turns out to be a cover for how she succeeds in staying attuned to her material and social circumstances, sensing their potential. This chapter shows that her energy also tends to be atmospheric, animating wider circles of the local community and thus affecting institutions and administrative people that before had only had formal contact with this particular hotel.