A Design-Driven Approach for the Innovation Management within Networked Enterprises

Abstract

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 according to the expectations of the single customer favour the development of new organizational paradigms such as the ”networked enterprise”. Supply-chain organization constituted by clients and suppliers has to consider also a series of actors with very different competences and specializations. If the concept of innovation is interpreted as the output of a new recombination of existing factors, nets of companies appear proper and coherent with the development activities. In many industries the access to tacit and distribute knowledge constitutes one of the principal critical success factor: for example, in the textile industry, the interaction with actors such as research centre, designer, design services, etc. allows to access and to interpret the diffused knowledge along the entire development chain. In this kind of scenario the ICTs cover a critical role. The identification of a model able to describe potential interrelations and synergies between ICTs and organizational structures has to consider a double aspect: (i)On the one hand the diffusion of new organizational models based on the networked enterprise constitutes a continuous stimulus for the creation of new technologies able to improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the knowledge flows; (ii)On the other hand the availability of new information technologies offers the opportunity to create new organizational models. The increasing presence of international competition as well as the importance of socio-cultural and contextual settings are transforming the future of industrial and social scenarios. The increasing pressures of international competition are challenging companies that find themselves unable to reach international sources of supply of components and knowledge, as well as unable to offer their products and services worldwide. Moreover, historical, social, demographic and industrial factors are also forcing companies to develop a system of offerings that merge profitability with social and cultural values. Couple these factors with an ever-increasing standard of living means that the development of products and industrial processes in order to survive must not only be profitable for the manufacturers, but also socially constructive. For this reason companies must develop the knowledge and new product development processes that can support them in designing and developing socially, culturally and physically constructive products. The obstacles that obstruct the development of this kind of products are related to two fundamental capabilities: the capability to develop new technologies, and the capability to understand and design new lifestyles. While several methods exist that support companies in understanding the needs from a technically functional basis (such as Quality Functional Deployment) or in managing the explicit knowledge of organisations (Knowledge Management Systems), a methodology for the identification, capturing and interpretation of value intensive information related to socio-cultural trends and latent needs is less formalized.