Roberto Verganti

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering DIG

This study examines how intimacy affects individuals' sensemaking of innovation in their organization. Although sensemaking facilitates understanding innovation and envisioning new worldviews, it involves a delicate process of self-disclosure, reflec- tion, personal contact and communication. Intimacy focuses on time-bounded inter- actions that fos...

Purpose This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the different competition-based approaches that policymakers can exploit to foster external knowledge search and their positioning among innovation policy measures. A growing number of companies have implemented initiatives to access external knowledge to increase their innovativeness, cons...

During the front end of innovation, teams embody abstract meanings into product concepts. The literature on Innovation of Meaning suggests that focusing on a single product‐user interaction supports this process. This Moment of Meaning facilitates the development of shared meaning and knowledge. We explore how the Moment of Meaning acts as a Bounda...

Purpose To overcome change management challenges, organizations often rely on stories as means of communication. Storytelling has emerged as a leading change management tool to influence and bring people on sharing knowledge. Nevertheless, this study aims to suggest stories of change as a more effective tool that helps people in taking action towar...

This study explores how resilience is activated in pairs fostering innovation. On the one hand, a growing body of literature affirms pairs as a form of collaboration adept at instigating and developing breakthrough innovations. On the other hand, innovation inevitably entails failures and setbacks requiring resilience to thrive. As such, numerous s...

Purpose The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has led to a global digitalization of organizational activities: the pandemic forced people and organizations to profoundly review values, purposes and norms. However, the research on how digital technologies impact human relationships and interactions at work results fragmented. Still, the i...

Publicly funded collaborative projects can represent an embryonic form of open innovation, as they force firms to collaborate and share knowledge with external partners. In this vein, they can trigger the implementation of a broader set of open innovation practices, despite usually operating according to policy logics that are not always aligned wi...

Purpose Having a shared vision is crucial for innovation. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of individual propensity to collaborate and innovate on the development of a shared vision. Design/methodology/approach The authors build a network in which each node represents the vision of one individual and link the network structur...

Purpose This study aims to investigate how two collaborative methods – selection and synthesis – influence knowledge convergence when people articulate a new strategic direction driving transformation within the organization. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a longitudinal field experiment developed in four organizations involving...

The importance of design as a source of value creation has been studied for decades. In the late 90s, however, a specific approach in the practice of design achieved a rapid diffusion across organizations: Design Thinking. This is a formal method for creative problem solving characterized by user-centeredness, ideation, and iterative prototyping. T...

The collaborative creation of a new strategic vision is recognised by scholars and practitioners as a key factor for the success of innovation initiatives. However, it is still unclear how people converge towards a new vision, as creative abrasions and tensions can occur when different ideas are brought together to create a shared interpretation. W...

Scholars across disciplines increasingly hear calls for more open and collaborative approaches to scientific research. The concept of Open Innovation in Science (OIS) provides a framework that integrates dispersed research efforts aiming to understand the antecedents, contingencies, and consequences of applying open and collaborative research pract...

Scholars and practitioners acknowledge the role of design, and specifically design thinking, as a driver of innovation and change. Design thinking is gaining attention in the business community beyond the traditional product innovation realm and is increasingly promoted as an engine for the creation of novel user experiences, new businesses, strate...

Radical circle is an innovation approach, alternative in comparison to innovation teams and innovation communities, superior to these when detailed managerial guidance is not readily available because of high uncertainty, high ambiguity, or both. Through an empirical case analysis of Angry Birds, the video game, we strengthen earlier radical-circle...

As society faces significant disruptions, the need for transformative innovation has never been more vital. However, this urgency is challenged in the digital era, characterized by incessant new technologies, extreme connectivity, and data transparency. Leaders seeking transformative innovation in the digital era face a new dilemma: socially orches...

Finding meaningful problems to address is a critical driver of innovation and entrepreneurship in today's turbulent environment, possibly even more so than problem solving. While the literature has mostly investigated problem finding in terms of discovering hidden user needs or root causes, this paper takes a different approach, namely problem find...

Purpose Mastering innovation in highly regulated markets might require companies to overcome significant barriers. Rules, laws and limitations on social, economic and institutional dimensions can hinder the ability of a company to transfer knowledge within and across organizational boundaries. However, as recent research in innovation management in...

Literature on Design Thinking has mainly focused on whether its key principles enhance performance in the development phase (the D of R&D) of the technological innovation process. However, it has dedicated scant attention to the earlier research phase (the R of R&D). This aspect is surprising, given that many innovations fail as a result of early r...

Purpose In a world where innovation became a “buzzword” and everyone within companies is required to foster innovation, the engagement of people toward innovation is fundamental to prompt individual motivation and actions to make innovation happen. However, despite the relevance of the relationship between engagement and innovation, the literature...

Despite the wealth of research on open innovation, the mechanisms that enable capturing value through adopting an open innovation approach remain largely unexplored. In this study, we focus on open innovation processes among firms and radical circles and shed light on the related value capture mechanisms. We rely on a detailed qualitative case anal...

Two-sided platforms emerged as a more common business model, mainly due to the spread of digital technologies. Economic literature suggests a 'quantity'-driven strategy to enhance the cross-side network externalities at the basis of the system. Nevertheless, the widespread of this business model lets emerge different peculiarities worth exploring....

Openness and collaboration in scientific research are attracting increasing attention from scholars and practitioners alike. However, a common understanding of these phenomena is hindered by disciplinary boundaries and disconnected research streams. We link dispersed knowledge on Open Innovation, Open Science, and related concepts such as Responsib...

Innovation is a collective and collaborative act. Even though ideas germinate in individuals’ minds, they need social interaction to be improved and brought to realisation. Therefore, much attention is now being paid to team collaboration as an organisational essential for innovation. Collaboration facilitates the combining of perspectives, compete...

Retailers can achieve competitive advantage by creating an omni-experience, a novel customer experience innovation strategy. Overview: Online-based retailers have made competing in the physical retail industry increasingly challenging. Building strong experiences to differentiate from the online-based players is key to survival. Brands can leverage...

Today's world is characterized by a continuous evolution in the demand and supply of new technology solutions, challenging the way companies pursue and manage technology development. Indeed, companies can no longer take decades to develop new technologies, but are compelled to deliver technologies in a short space of time. Despite the ample literat...

Design thinking is spreading extremely rapidly among organizations in terms of interest and practices. Far from being linked to the “form” of products, design thinking is accepted as a formal creative problem‐solving method with the intent to foster innovation. However, the spread of design thinking in practice has not been coupled with a similarly...

Overview Several approaches to developing new technologies are available to companies, but few studies explore how the development process can reveal hidden opportunities in existing technologies. This paper investigates the technology development process to consider how they can discover opportunities that generate higher value for users. Implemen...

Innovation is a collaborative act. Thus, a lot of attention has been paid to teamwork as the prevalent approach for innovation in companies. However, teams also present limits, due to conflicts and compromises when converging. This study, which focuses on the development of innovative directions, explores the nature of collaboration by looking at t...

Design has recently gained much attention among practitioners and scholars as a source of innovation. Firms are increasingly investing in design and involving design firms in their innovation processes. Yet, the role of design in innovation and competition remains a rather young (preparadigmatic) area, with blurred boundaries and often unclear or c...

In the past few decades, several researchers have tried to understand how technology development can be influenced to reduce development expenditures. Moreover, the growing attention to idea generation from both practitioners and academics has given rise to several different veins of inquiry. Considering this, in the literature several studies have...

Design and especially design thinking are becoming a strategic source of competitive advantage. From its business theorization in early 2000s the adoption and awareness in both academics and practitioners’ world is unmeasurable. Todays the attention of academics is no more only on the process and its phases, inspiration, ideation and implementation...

Scholars and practitioners are acknowledging the central role that design can play in innovation. Design is increasingly becoming a strategic source of competitive advantage, to the point that scholars investigate its managerial side and its impact in the creation of value. Design Thinking, in particular, is making the headlines, with an extremely...

This paper contains an exploratory analysis of the business model innovations (BMIs) that firms in cultural and creative industries (CCIs) undertake along their life-cycle. Despite the role that creative and cultural and creative firms (CCFs) have in the economic development of industrialised countries, they tend to remain small and often fail due...

The design‐driven innovation literature focuses on meanings that people give to products and services. This paper investigates how new meanings can be designed and proposed to society rather than to individuals in the particular context of smart mobility. Smart mobility is characterized by a wide range of digital technologies that aim to make all m...

Organizations continually face challenges of navigating the complexities of organizational transformation. We offer a comprehensive approach-organizational innovation through radical circles-that attempts to address many of the problems associated with organizational change and development. We use a real-world example of the transformation of a sch...

Design has recently gained substantial attention among practitioners and scholars as a source of innovation. In contemporary business and academia, design is increasingly viewed as an important strategic asset. Moreover, the role of design and designers in generating value is growing in relevance to the point that they can be considered part of inb...

The rising cost of R&D activities and the increasing complexity of technologies and markets have led to the widespread diffusion of collaborative and open innovation processes. As a consequence, different open innovation paradigms have become the protagonists of many innovation strategies. Although this type of approach is an optimal strategy to id...

The diffusion of digital technologies enables companies to propose new business, products and services. The business environment is characterized by increasing levels of competition, and cus- tomers can choose a growing number of solutions. In this scenario, companies seek new dimen- sion of innovation: the meaning. A vigorous debate has taken plac...

Purpose The importance and complexity of proposing radically new meanings are well-established in the literature. However, a limited number of contributions have analyzed how they can be developed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development of radically new meanings at the basis of the Slow Food movement to contribute to the topic. De...

Purpose Notwithstanding the importance innovation scholars have accredited to design-driven innovation (DDI), no attempts have been made so far to systematically study whether and how this innovation strategy can be used in the retail context in order to gain and nurture competitive advantage. The purpose of this paper is to make a first step towar...

We live in a world awash with ideas. Thanks to open innovation, design thinking, crowdsourcing, and to digital technologies, organizations nowadays have easy access to an unprecedented amount of novel opportunities. The consequence? Ideas are becoming a commodity. They are cheap. To succeed in an overcrowded world we do not need one more idea. We...

We live in a world awash with ideas. Thanks to open innovation, design thinking, crowdsourcing, and to digital technologies, organizations nowadays have easy access to an unprecedented amount of novel opportunities. The consequence? Ideas are becoming a commodity. They are cheap. To succeed in an overcrowded world we do not need one more idea. We...

In contemporary business and academia, design has been increasingly viewed as an important strategic asset such that several scholars and executives have recently investigated the links among design, innovation and competitive advantage. Indeed, recent and emerging literature streams are exploring the potential contribution design can provide in va...

The strategic role of design-driven innovation is being increasingly recognized. Many studies show that investments in design positively influence the innovative capacity of firms and consequently their competitive performance. However, few researchers have explored how this relationship comes about. The studies that over the years have contributed...

This study analyses the effects and dynamics behind a new type of innovation policy for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs): innovation vouchers. This policy is aimed at encouraging SMEs to collaborate with universities and with organisations offering Knowledge Intensive Services. Despite its innovativeness and growing diffusion, the innovation vou...

Alta Scuola Politecnica (www.asp-poli.it, (ASP 2009)) was founded in 2004 by the Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino. It annually selects 150 talented students solely on the basis of merit, from among the applicants to the Master of Science in Engineering, Architecture and Design at the two universities. The resulting community is made...

The paper focuses on innovation in the automotive retail industry. Innovation in service has been acknowledged as a critical source of competitive advantage and retail firms are looking for innovations that can increase their competitiveness. This notwithstanding, there are no studies that focus on whether and how design-driven innovation (DDI) can...

We live in a world awash with ideas. We have become more creative, and thanks to digital technologies, we have easy access to an unprecedented amount of novel opportunities. How to make sense of this overabundance of opportunities? How to envision the next big thing? How to avoid trying everything and fall into the paradox of ideas (the more ideas...

When new technologies approach the market, companies usually look for ways to improve existing applications or simply to replace previous technologies. The management literature identifies several strategies for gaining value from technological discontinuities, including improving performance, becoming the cost leader and being the first-mover, and...

While recent research indicates that combining scientific and entrepreneurial activities at the level of academic scientists is feasible, the literature has remained muted on the dynamics behind such successful combinations. Indeed, little is known about how researchers avoid conflicts of commitment and conflicts of interest as well as the so-calle...

In the increasingly knowledge-based economy, the role of the service sector, and in particular, of Knowledge Intensive Business Services (KIBS), is widely acknowledged. KIBS are considered 'bridges of innovation'. Furthermore, in addition to this pivotal role in supporting the competitiveness and development of other firms, KIBS sectors are, per se...

The growing attention to design as a strategic asset has recently triggered interest from scholars and executives in exploring the link between design, technology and management. Design-driven innovation addresses the symbolic and emotional value of products through a collaborative research process. Although literature recognises the importance of...

Studies of innovation management have often focused on two domains: technologies and markets. An ever-increasing standard of living is pushing companies to develop products and services that are not only profitable but also socially responsible. Sustainable housing offers an intriguing empirical setting that allows the investigation of new processe...

Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change Donald A. Norman, Roberto Verganti Donald A. Norman and Stephen W. Draper, Centered System Design: New Perspectives on Human–Computer Inter- action (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986); Donald A. Norman, “Human-Centered Product Development,” Chapter 10...

The recent success of companies that compete through design has raised an interest on how to innovate the customer experience of a product or service. Even in industrial markets firms are increasingly moving beyond the improvement of functional performance, to address a deeper redefinition of the reason why their clients buy and use a product, what...

The open innovation paradigm represents one of the most debated topics in technology and innovation management research in the last decade. Concurrently, different modes of collaboration involve different strategic trade-offs. Scholars operating in the technology management field have investigated the distinction between brokers who provide knowled...

Creating ideas is no longer seen as a challenge within companies, creative sessions and brainstorming is widespread in most companies. However, when creating a design brief there is a lack of tools and methods finding problems and framing situations of interest. This paper examines the characteristics of storyboarding, the making of the storyboard,...

The design brief is commonly a written description of a scope for a design problem that requires some kind of visual design. The exploration of opportunities before formulating the design brief results in framing and reframing the problem to create a common shared understanding of the problem. In this paper the applicability of Storyboard, the actu...

In the ‘knowledge economy’, knowledge‐intensive business services (KIBS) are a key driver for innovation and competitiveness. The internationalization of these businesses raises challenges given their specificities such as knowledge intensity, the importance of customer interaction and intimacy in service delivery. This paper focuses on design cons...

It is widely accepted that industrial design can play an important role in the development of innovative products, but integrating design-thinking into new product development (NPD) is a challenge. This is because industrial designers have very different perspectives and goals than the other members of the NPD team, and this can lead to tensions. I...

In this article we investigated whether academic departments do experience a trade-off among different research outputs. More specifically, we define four types of academic research outputs: quantity (publications); quality (citation indexes); research funds obtained through research grants; and applied research funds obtained through external orde...

The intensification of the international competition and the necessity to compete in a global context push companies to introduce new organizational forms; the continuous evolutions of the contexts both in terms of market demand and available technologies, the progressive reduction of the time-to-market, the necessity to personalize the offering ac...

Thanks to the collaboration the internet has made possible and the open innovation it has spurred, we live in a world where ideas and solutions are abundant. The main challenge facing innovation managers today is how to take advantage of this wealth of opportunities, says the author, a professor of innovation management. He contends that being firs...

Literature on the diffusion of innovation (DoI) is particularly rich and articulated and has been a topic of practical and academic interest since the 1960s. Empirical research in this field has focused on new technologies and managerial practices. However, given the increasingly important role played by design in today's business and academic aren...

Purpose Product functionalities aim to satisfy the operative needs of the customer, while product meanings (i.e. the emotion and the symbolic values represented by the product) aim to satisfy the emotional and socio‐cultural needs of the customer. What consumers are increasingly looking for in consumer products are new forms of psychological satisf...

To improve product styling and ergonomics, a growing number of companies are exploring new ways to involve design consultants in their innovation processes. Many studies have underlined the importance of designers in the innovation processes of successful companies, and some designers have achieved ‘superstar’ status. By capturing, recombining and...

R&D networks have been studied and promoted by scholars and policy-makers as a way to increase the performance of Innovation Systems. At the same time limited attention has been devoted to evaluate their performances. This paper reviews the literature that studied R&D networks from different approaches and suggests a framework to help developing ev...

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OVERVIEW: Only a few companies have mastered the design-driven approach to innovation. This paper examines what it means to make design a central part of the business process, able to add value to products and create new markets. More specifically, it focuses on the interplay between the functional and semantic dimensions of a product. Case studies...