L'innovazione nelle relazioni tra i nodi di un network. Il caso dei fornitori artigiani nell'industria del mobile

Abstract

This article aims to contribute at the flourishing debate on innovation networks and focuses the attention on the interaction work among designer, enterprises and handicraft suppliers. The central argument is that product innovation, within manufactory networks, is emergent from the relation among knots of the same network. Innovation takes shape in craftsmen’s practices and is embedded in collaboration practices among firms, designers and craftsmen suppliers. It is in these collaboration practices that new material articulations emerge and the new takes the final configuration. The new articulation is a recursive process made by experimentation and exploration that involve practical manipulations, reflexive thought (Sennett, 2008; Yaneva, 2004) and aesthetical judgment (Strati, 1999; Parolin, 2010). This process implies: an active involvement on the object of work; the use of the project as thing (Brown 2001; 2005); the use of artefacts that compose the project as reference to evaluate new solutions; the circulation of temporary objects and the face-to-face interactions among actors of the network.