Portrayed as a clash between two opposing valuation-ideologies, innovation appears a simple (albeit violent) enterprise. In practice, innovating – truly shifting market valuation for a socioeconomic ideology – becomes extremely difficult because of the countless factors that impinge on it. These factors collectively can be called bureaucracy: the systemic, emergent will-to-delay that resists all action and saps energy. It makes the simple difficult and the difficult seemingly impossible. In a world more comfortable living in denial, pretending market equilibrium is peacefully aligned to hegemonic truth bureaucracy is the resistance to all re-valuation, so the very essence of innovation (as a clash between opposed valuation-ideologies) creates bureaucracy around it.

In the dynamic environment of competitively interacting factors of production, bureaucracy abounds. Bureaucracy may be a problem of execution, as a collective indecision over a course of action. It may be oppositional, when a competitor Information System possess first-mover advantages, economies of scale, or some barrier-to-entry must be overcome and we hesitate to commit to the risk of open competition. Bureaucracy may be externally instigated, imposed by the disruptive actions of a competitor Information System, the strategic landscape, shifting market trends, or mere chance. Bureaucracy may be self-induced, caused by a lack of strategic vision, lack of coordination, unclear or complicated plans, complex task organizations or command relationships, or complicated technologies.

Whatever form it takes, because socioeconomic innovation is a human enterprise, bureaucracy will always have a psychological as well as a market impact. While we should attempt to minimize self-induced bureaucracy, the greater requirement is to fight for value-signification effectively despite the existence of bureaucracy. Thus, at the very outset, one essential means to overcome bureaucracy is the will to fight it; we prevail over bureaucracy through persistent strength of “mind and spirit”. While personally striving to overcome the effects of bureaucracy, we must attempt at the same time to raise our competitor’s bureaucracy to a level that weakens their ability to compete. We can readily identify countless examples of bureaucracy, but until we have experienced it ourselves, we cannot hope to appreciate it fully. Only through experience can we come to appreciate the force of will necessary to overcome bureaucracy and to develop a realistic appreciation for what is possible in innovation and what is not. While training our ideological actors should attempt to simulate the experience of innovation, its excitement, frustrations, and creative synergy, we must realize the insufficiency of training and workshops in their inherently controlled environments: training can never fully duplicate the level of bureaucracy in real socioeconomic systems.