Let us imagine a futuristic financial marketplace. Instead of marble bank headquarters there are lines of code. Instead of advisors in suits there are anonymous avatars on Discord. Instead of procedures there are smart contracts operating 24/7. For many economists and regulators, this still appears as an exotic curiosity or even a threat. Meanwhile, communities involved in decentralized finance (DeFi) speak of a revolution that is redefining what “finance” and “innovation” actually mean.
It is within this tension that Professor Paweł Krzyworzeka of Kozminski University moves in his article When mainstream measures fail: an ethnographic approach to ‘Innovativeness’ in rejected arenas, published in Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research. The article offers a strong contribution to the debate on why our standard measures of innovativeness begin to fail where the mainstream world encounters “rejected arenas”, such as DeFi.
For years, we have grown accustomed to thinking that innovativeness can be measured through patents, R&D expenditure, the number of research teams, or positions in rankings. In practice, however, we increasingly encounter domains where these indicators prove inadequate. From the perspective of financial institutions and regulators, DeFi is often described as a bubble or a casino. From the perspective of its participants, it functions as a testing ground for new forms of cooperation, governance, and investment.
Professor Krzyworzeka shows that in such spaces, classical measures of innovation simply fail to capture the signal. They focus on what external observers consider valuable: stability, scale, and regulatory compliance. For DeFi participants, however, entirely different criteria may matter, such as the degree of decentralization, independence from institutions, openness of code, or the ability to enter the system from anywhere in the world. It is somewhat like judging jazz by the standards of a symphony orchestra. Technically it is possible, but the essence of the genre slips out of view.
Rejected arenas and other cosmologies of innovation
The author proposes calling such spaces “rejected arenas”, meaning areas in which innovations are developed but, for various reasons, are not taken seriously by the mainstream. DeFi is a particularly vivid example. It is an environment full of confusion, spectacular collapses, and speculative bubbles, yet at the same time a place where ideas long discussed in traditional finance are tested in practice, albeit usually implemented there with great caution. These include the automation of trust, programmable money, and global services without intermediaries.
In such arenas, two worlds collide. The external world says: “this does not meet our criteria of success, so it is not real innovation”. The internal world responds: “precisely because we reject your criteria, we can build something new”. What is at stake is not only tools or technologies, but an entire system of meaning.
One of the most interesting threads in the article is the proposal to view innovation as a set of “cosmologies”, that is, worlds of meaning and assumptions in which people operate. In DeFi, such a cosmology is co-created by narratives of financial sovereignty, distrust toward traditional institutions, and the belief that code can take over part of the role traditionally played by law and officials. If a researcher ignores this internal logic, all they will see is a chaotic collection of applications and tokens. If they take it seriously, they will notice an attempt to build an alternative system of values, one in which transparency matters more than convenience, and self-custody of assets matters more than the protection offered by a central bank.
Ethnography as a radar for hidden innovations
This leads to the next step. To study such phenomena reliably, tools other than statistics and reports are needed. Professor Krzyworzeka reaches for an ethnographic perspective drawn from anthropology. An ethnographer does not start with an Excel spreadsheet, but with presence. They follow community discussions, participate in events, talk to people, and try to understand their language, jokes, and conflicts. They ask questions not only about profit, but also about meaning: why this matters to participants and what it offers beyond money. This is a return to a fundamental gesture of the social sciences. Before we evaluate something, we should try to see the world through the eyes of those who live in it.
In the context of DeFi, such an approach makes it possible to distinguish projects that are pure speculation from those that, in the eyes of the community, genuinely solve concrete problems. These include facilitating international transfers, providing access to financial services for people outside major centers, or creating new forms of collective decision-making over shared resources.
Although the article focuses on decentralized finance, its message reaches much further. “Rejected arenas” can also be found in alternative technological scenes, grassroots urban movements, or informal networks of cooperation. Novelty emerges there as well, even if it does not always fit the definitions of innovation used by ministries, corporations, or research institutes.
The work of Professor Paweł Krzyworzeka can therefore be read as an invitation to broaden our field of vision. If we are serious about an “innovation-driven economy”, we cannot look only at a few well-known sectors and metropolises. Sometimes the most interesting experiments take place on the margins, in spaces that from the mainstream perspective appear suspicious or frivolous. Instead of reflexively labeling them as noise, it is worth checking whether they are not signals from a different, as yet undescribed order.
The article published in Innovation can also be read as a lesson in scholarly humility. Rather than believing that we possess universal measures of innovativeness, it may be better to treat them as just one of many possible tools. And to allow for the possibility that innovation, understood differently, may emerge precisely where today we see only “rejected arenas”.
