ARTICLE Innovative action as skilled affordance-responsiveness: An embodied-mind approach Ali Yakhlef 1 | Erik Rietveld 2,3,4 1 Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden 2 Department of Philosophy/ILLC, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 3 Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands 4 Amsterdam University Medical Center, Department of Psychiatry, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Correspondence Ali Yakhlef, Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Kräftriket 3, 114 19 Stockholm, Sweden. Email: aya@sbs.su.se Funding information ERC Starting Grant, Grant/Award Number: 679190; European Research Council, Grant/ Award Number: 679190 Innovative action has often been regarded as the preserve of the deliberate mind and the outcome of individual explicit thought processes. In this regard, the material con- text within which innovative action occurs is considered as a passive container or at best a modifier of innovative action. Although recent studies have witnessed an interest in relating innovation to issues of embodiment, space and materiality, main- stream research remains largely grounded in a cognitivist, psychological idiom. The present paper takes an embodied-mind perspective and focuses on the individual– environment system as a whole to suggest that innovative action emerges from an agent's skilful responses to unconventional environmental affordances (or action pos- sibilities). Rather than viewing innovation as occurring within material contexts, we offer a new understanding of context as a rich landscape of affordances that is partly constitutive of innovation. The paper concludes with discussions of the proposed approach, its implications for studying innovative action and suggestions for further enquiry. 1 | INTRODUCTION Researchers have recognized that work environments influence organizational creativity and innovation through, among other things, influencing individuals’ innovative thinking and intrinsic motivation (Amabile, 1997). Work environments may involve organizational motivation (including financial resources, time availability and per- sonnel resources), managerial practices (such as challenging work and supervisory encouragement, and autonomy) (Amabile, 1996; Amabile & Conti, 1999) and material, physical design features of the environments (such as flexible workspaces) (Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977; Kristensen, 2004; Moultrie et al., 2007). Although organizational, managerial and contextual features have warranted much research interest, the physical environment has not been rec- ognized to the same extent until recently. For instance, in the archi- tectural literature, Alexander et al. (1977) claim that a carefully well- designed workspace can foster innovation and creativity. Moultrie et al. (2007) posit that physical environments can facilitate and support the delivery of a firm's innovation strategy through inscribing that strategy in the features of the design of the environment. The gen- eral understanding is that physical environments affect workers’ morale and productivity, and enhance employees’ inspiration, thereby influencing performance (Moultrie et al., 2007). Viewing the physical environment from this perspective would assume that agents would respond to it in relatively identical ways. Furthermore, there is a tendency in this literature to adopt methodological individualism, that is, individuals are taken to be the unit of analysis (with its emphasis on psychological features, such as motivation and mood). The material context is merely framed as a static, passive site or place where innovative activities take place (Bledow, Frase, Anderson, Erez, & Farr, 2009). Agents are considered as coherently-bounded entities, as separate from their material context, rather than being part and parcel of it. Accordingly, several critics have pointed out this failure to generate research designs that depict actively interacting perceivers and environments that shed light on the links among (inno- vative) action, perception and interaction (Valenti & Good, 1991). Sev- eral researchers from various disciplines are arguing that this dualism of agent and environment is problematic because it ignores the point that agent and environment are bound up by transactional exchanges. It is in these mutual transactions that innovative behaviour emerges (Malafouris, 2015). Received: 29 June 2018 Revised: 18 June 2019 Accepted: 14 October 2019 DOI: 10.1111/caim.12345 Creat Innov Manag. 2019;1–13. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/caim © 2019 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1