Consideration of work and production, their locations and the people who embody them, appears increasingly as a founding factor of a different approach to the company and its culture. Work seen as creativity and capacity of manufacture, as initiative and innovation, appears as a lens, somewhat neglected to date, for observing how firms today, after the orgy of computerisation and financialisation at all costs, succeed not only in riding out the recession but also in creating in any case wealth. It is corporate culture which becomes work culture, or rather ties again threads partly broken with that vision of production which, until some time ago, belonged to great entrepreneurs.

It is important therefore to understand how managers can consider work today and, more generally, the role of the so-called “human capital” in the company. Also in small to medium-sized firms which are in actual fact those which make up the core of industrial production, facing up to larger companies. This was the goal which led Lidia Galabova (from the Technical University of Sofia) and Linda McKie (Durham University) in their The Five Fingers of My Hand: Human Capital and Well-Being in SMEs, just published in Personnel Review. The more specific aim of the study is that of understanding the attitude of managers towards “human capital” and well-being in firms, understood as factors which affect the results of the same firm. The study is based on the data collected from 42 semi-structured interviews with managers of SMEs in areas of growth in the services industry. The research was carried out in three countries of the European Union: Scotland (UK), Finland and Bulgaria.

The result obtained by the two researchers is only apparently banal. The managers of small and medium-sized firms are naturally interested in skills and experience as key elements of the “human capital”. Yet willingness, ability to learn and enthusiasm are, as explained in the research, often considered more important. All this then converges into that “well-being” which in many cases succeeds in making the difference between one firm and another.

The Five Fingers of My Hand: Human Capital and Well-being in SMEs

Lidia Galabova, Linda McKie

Personnel Review, vol. 42, 6, 2013.

“Kalòs kai agathòs”, the relationship between the beautiful and the good, aesthetics and ethics, is an awareness rooted in Western culture. In times of metamorphosis other relationships also have to be strengthened, those between the beautiful and the useful, the good and the productive, aesthetics and competitiveness. Playing on the creative dimension of sciences, philosophy and literature and on the search for new forms (therefore new materials, new products, new fictions) and on the relative technologies, processed not so much as techniques as above all thought and language. A contemporary side which is historically aware and polytechnic in design terms. Steve Jobs maintained that he had found out that large companies took aesthetics seriously as it puts over a message of how the company sees itself. Reintroducing, possibly unknowingly, a thought by Adriano Olivetti, contained in the speech given at the opening of the Pozzuoli plant in 1955: “facing the most distinctive gulf in the world, this factory is elevated with respect to the beauty of the setting and so that beauty is a comfort in daily work”.

A homage to external beauty and also an assimilation of beauty – aesthetics and function in fact. The proof lies in the new factories built in recent years in Italy: Maserati, Ferrari, Tod’s, Lavazza, Diesel, Cucinelli (“high creativity will save these generations and the next”) and Pirelli, with a new plant in Settimo Torinese for producing tyres featuring “premium” products – top of the range and excellent quality thanks to sophisticated state-of-the-art robotic technologies) and a “backbone”, a structure designed by Renzo Piano to house research labs, offices, facilities, libraries, spaces for meetings and leisure, a glass and steel parallelepiped four hundred metres long, filled with light and opening onto the two production plants alongside it, with a roof of solar panels. All this surrounded by five hundred cherry trees. An attractive factory in fact, where working is pleasant and therefore more productive and more effectively productive. In a “sustainable” context, not only in environmental terms (the factory has reduced water consumption and the energy comes renewable sources) but also in social terms. As Piano explains, “we staked on interpreting sustainability as a language and not just as a technique to be applied in a more or less appropriate way to a container designed differently”. In this case too design culture and product culture are combined in an original way. In the factory in fact, but not just in the factory.

Piano’s reasoning can in fact be repeated also for the latest of his works, Muse, the science museum in Trento, opened on Saturday 27 July. Glass, wood, steel, concrete, an exhibition and research structure, a collection of materials to narrate nature and human intervention. “A junction between research and business”, according to the management of Muse, built on the site of an old industrial plant (formerly producing components for Michelin tyres) and suitable for representing the change from the old industrial economy to the season of the “knowledge economy”, which enervates production activities that need, in terms in fact of local competitiveness, to take a leap forwards in terms of cultural, technological and scientific capabilities.

A science museum therefore as a means of narration which links up knowledge, training and production. A system opening outwards an area, Trentino and north-east Italy, a strong manufacturing mission. An incentive to build, over time, unusual links between science and its applications.

There is in fact a close link in this between places of production and places of representation. Piano is an excellent interpreter of this. His works, such as “the beautiful and sustainable factory” and the museum described here contain not only the contemporary version of “kalòs kai agathòs” but also the indication of the possible good future of Italy: the creation of quality has both a technological and poetical spirit.

The future also involves the rebirth and the consolidation of a new humanism, focused on humankind and on everything, on the implications of the economy which are not just figures but also people and an enterprising spirit. It is said that we have to break the mould and take a leap forwards (not into the void) and use our imagination with feet planted firmly on the ground. This is the new approach which is becoming increasingly widespread in response to the crisis that began in 2008, to the shortfall in high finance, to seeing production and business as something else with respect to manufacture and individual initiative. All this also involves men and women capable of seeing past their noses and of taking the place of those specialists who in actual fact appear as the “educated ignorant”.

This is what Giuliano da Empoli, writer and president of Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, has done in his Contro gli specialisti. La rivincita dell’umanesimo [“Against Specialists. The Victory of Humanism”] which represents a mental adventure in all areas of human knowledge: from art to material production, from history to modern politics, from philosophy to the economy, via computer technology, finance, sport and much more besides. The book by da Empoli – less than 150 pages for reading in one go – tells how specialists in all areas have impoverished the future of society, production and labour and how, instead, today there is a sort of return victory by those – businessmen, politicians, economists, scientists and philosophers – who succeed in reasoning and acting, looking not at the details but at the entire movement of the reality in which they live and work. There is talk therefore in the book of bananas and ketchup (find out the reason why by reading the book) and also of Ortega y Gasset, Aristotele, Smith, Leonardo da Vinci, Taylor, Jobs and many other unknown specialists and non-specialists, reviewing the entire old and new class of politicians and scholars who have had a hand in today’s economy, business and institutions.

This book gives a “strange”, different and non-conformist reading of the problems gripping our society and our form of production and is also and above all a positive outcry given the vicissitudes we all have to face.                        

Contro gli specialisti. La rivincita dell’umanesimo.

Giuliano da Empoli.

Marsilio, 2013.

There’s no doubt that at the core of innovation lie also creativity and an enterprising and inventive spirit. However any creative spirit, in order to be productive, above all from the economic and business standpoint, has to be set within an organisation capable of exploiting its positive features, of channelling it in the right direction and of not wasting its good ideas but, on the contrary, of leading them towards a goal. Unsteadily balanced within companies, creativity lies at the root of many innovations and ultimately the success of many firms.

Therefore the relationships between creativity in companies, the organisation and corporate culture to be found in the same are to be understood fully in order to see why some of them are successful and others are not.

This is what two university researchers and a business consultant have done: Baek-Kyoo Joo (from Winona State University in Minnesota, USA), Baiyin Yang (from Tsinghua University in Beijing) and Gary N. McLean (from McLean Global Consulting in St. Paul, Minnesota), in their Creativity and Human Resource Development: An Integrative Literature Review and a Conceptual Framework for Future Research newly published in the Human Resource Development Review.

The assumption on which the authors base is that creativity in companies has increased in the past two decades due to the whirlwind changes in the corporate context and on the markets, just like the explosion in the knowledge-based economy. However, in order to understand how nowadays creativity and organisation come together and the results they achieve, it is important to obtain diagrams for interpretation and analysis.

The article therefore discusses the history and change in interpretations and research into creativity based on three viewpoints: the personal characteristics of those working in the company, the perspectives of the context in which the companies operate and the prospects for integration between creative drive and organisational patterns. Empirical literature published between 2001 and 2012 is therefore examined to produce an important and useful summary of the methods whereby it is possible to understand in full how and why creativity can operate successfully in companies.

Download pdf 

Creativity and Human Resource Development: An Integrative Literature Review and a Conceptual Framework for Future Research

Baek-Kyoo Joo, Gary N. McLean, Baiyin Yang

Human Resource Development Review, July 2013.

He is an industrialist in the clothing sector, an international success story in Italian production. He has a factory in a fourteenth-century village near Perugia. He dedicates time every day to reading a book, declaring himself to be a great fan of Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and Plato’s dialogues on Socrates, the memoirs of Marcus Aurelius and Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, Saint Benedict who taught us to be strict and gentle, a demanding master and a loving father, and Kant, awed “by the starry sky above me and the moral law within me”, the lesson in tolerance of Frederick II  and the passage from the Bible in which the prophet Ezekiel asks the sentinel how long the night is, receiving the answer that it is not long or short but dawn is breaking.

His name is Brunello Cucinelli and to those who interview him (La Stampa, 15 June) he demonstrates the importance of a great cultural passion for success in business. It takes culture in fact in order to be competitive. Technical culture (production and products) and general culture (contexts, visions of the future, the soul of those who produce and those who consume goods and services). Innovation is in fact expressed through technologies. Yet technologies are none other than a thought which links mental processes to manual skills. It is the actual long history of business in Italy which documents how the key to success lies still in the extraordinary capacity of product ranges to adapt to the changes in needs, cultures, customs and consumption of the various groups of the public, on markets which are constantly changing.

Cucinelli, as a “humanist” entrepreneur, is the umpteenth demonstration of the accuracy of the definition of a great historian such as Carlo M. Cipolla on the Italian aptitude “to make fine things, which everyone likes”. It is also necessary to have, deep down in one’s personal identity, the colours of Titian, the heresies on the light of Caravaggio, the unprejudiced curiosity of Giordano Bruno and Galileo, the moral passions of Leopardi and the painstaking research of Giulio Natta (even without explicit awareness of the exact cultural references) in order to be able to create growth for companies whose competitive rationale is based on style, culture and quality.

“Technology is equal to thought”, wrote in fact Il Sole24Ore in its review a few months ago (4 November 2012) of the republication, by Bollati Boringhieri, of A History of Technology edited by Singer,  Holmyard, Hall and Williams in 1954, a “classic” which still has a lot to say. What? For example that the science education of the new generations does not coincide with simple technical training, that technology is closely related to science, placing it within the dimension of “applied research”, and that the capacity for specialisation is definitely necessary, but without forgetting the essential nature of the general vision. As every good philosopher of science knows (and as the fanatics of technology forget).

It is important therefore to discuss openly technologies, the greater spread of scientific culture and more prolific relations between university education and the needs of the labour market, i.e. of companies. Without forgetting in fact the testimony of Cucinelli (and the corporate histories of Olivetti and Pirelli, to extend the range). Without falling into the trap of the opposition between scientific culture and humanistic culture, yet if anything storing up the experience gained in France’s grandes écoles where engineers have, among the compulsory subjects for study, philosophy, drama and writing. General thinking in fact, in order not to be technical but good technologists, able to think of a machine, its production effects, the relations with those who adopt it, the economic, social and environmental spin-offs. Something the Italian Politecnici also know well. Culture is business, just as business is culture.

Innovate or die. This is an (extremely) brief possible description of the condition of a great part (although not the whole) of Italy’s industrial system. It is no secret that there is a lack of innovation here, for many reasons, and it is necessary to understand the action to be taken in order to bridge the divide which separates us from industry which has instead made innovation its strong point. Starting for example from the concept of “open innovation” as coined by Henry Chesbrough, whose book Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape was recently published in Italy.

Chesbrough is executive director of the Center for Open Innovation and professor at the Haas School of Business of the University of Berkeley in California. Above all he has succeeded in merging theory and practice in order to provide new guidelines for managers and businessmen.

Open innovation, therefore, i.e. the idea whereby, in a world where the sources of knowledge are increasingly distributed and diffused, good opportunities have to be grasped outside of the company in order to drive growth. In other words, according to Chesbrough, businesses of all sizes have to learn how to manage a process of innovation “open” to outside stimuli, capable at the same time of exporting those ideas which internally would not be put to good use. Obviously however tools and examples are needed in order to move from theory to practice.

This is exactly what Chesbrough explains in his latest opus. Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape  – 280 pages in the Italian edition – contains two things: a series of useful tools for understanding the hurdles and risks of the “process of opening” of a company to innovation and a series of examples of firms who have already gone down this road. Thus there is mention of CR Firenze, Ferrovie dello Stato and SIA/SSB (which received an innovative boost from the change of some executives in Europe) or of Intesa Sanpaolo (forced to change by the change in the company structure) and also Almaviva, Elsag and Xerox (which innovated, sharing the risks with customers) and small firms like EDRA and Loccioni (which changed in order to stand apart from and compete with companies much bigger than them). Other cases discussed are those of STMicroelectronics, Fiat, Brembo and Tiscali, and Finmeccanica.

A book therefore to be read from cover to cover, and put into practice, starting from the unique features of Italian firms.

Open. Modelli di business per l’innovazione

Henry Chesbrough

Egea, 2013.

Italy’s industry is losing competitiveness and production levels in all sectors are lower than those prior to the recession. With the exception of food and pharmaceuticals the scale of the loss of production is now worrying. Alongside the effects of the economic situation there is also the historic decline in textiles and footwear and also those of key sectors such as electronics and cars. Against this type of background, which undermines the foundations of the actual business culture in Italy, a single question arose some time ago: what can be done?

Among the answers special account is to be taken of that which comes from a group of eight researchers from Banca d’Italia who in a newly published study on the evolution of the Italian industrial system propose three lines of action in order to attempt to raise the fortunes of the Italian production system.

Antonio Accetturo, Antonio Bassanetti, Matteo Bugamelli, Ivan Faiella, Paolo Finaldi Russo, Daniele Franco, Silvia Giacomelli and Massimo Omiccioli, in their Il sistema industriale italiano tra globalizzazione e crisi [“The Italian industrial system – globalisation and crisis”], start from a basic observation: in 2012 industry produced 257 billion of added value, employed 4.7 million people, is a “fundamental source of innovation and competitiveness” (with over 70% of expenditure on research and development in the private sector) and has “a decisive role in balancing accounts with other countries”. Therefore we cannot stand by and watch.

This led to proposals. First of all to make a selection, i.e. act on the mechanisms of allocation of resources from less productive companies and sectors to the more productive ones, from manufacturing where the competitive pressure from developing countries is not sustainable to other more advanced and complex ones. A task which involves a review of the system of social buffers and active labour policies, the review of the capacities of the financial system and the overhaul of corporate taxation. Secondly the costs sustained by Italian companies should be reduced (energy, bureaucracy, infrastructure and public services are the main culprits). Thirdly, industrial policies have to be made less invasive and fragmentary, which means in fact targeting actions better, staking on a growth in size, on R&D and also on restructuring of public activity of support for internationalisation.

Of course these are proposals condensed into 70 pages of reasoning, figures and graphs, but they are clear ideas. That which is needed in order to start to understand more.

Il sistema industriale italiano tra globalizzazione e crisi

Antonio Accetturo, Antonio Bassanetti, Matteo Bugamelli, Ivan Faiella, Paolo Finaldi Russo, Daniele Franco, Silvia Giacomelli, Massimo Omiccioli

Banca d’Italia, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (occasional papers), 193, July, 2013

True knowledge, according to Giulio Giorello, one of Europe’s most respected philosophers of science, is like Ulysses, “a poet who had the courage to navigate by different constellations than those of known biases”, the goal of which is “to establish a sort of new agreement, an original alliance between those who develop knowledge nearly to the limits of our capacity to reason and those with a stubborn drive to understand the secrets of philosophy and the arts” (see Corriere della Sera, 11 July). In other words, an agreement between scientist and artist, an example of “polytechnic culture” in the very Italian brand of the best humanism, a synthesis of various forms of knowledge as taught by Piero della Francesca (both an extraordinary mathematician and great painter), Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo and so on, right up until the controversial trend of the twentieth century when the humanities and the sciences would separate and we would see the rise of the unbearable concept of “the two cultures”. Now, though, it has come time to reunite these two forms of knowledge in order to find solutions to the complexity of the Great Crisis, which has placed traditional paradigms of production, trade and consumption into doubt and has forced us to seek better environmental and social sustainability in economic development.

This is the new challenge of the culture of enterprise, to have a strategy for discovering new points of view and original ways of creating jobs and wealth, to become familiar with the processes that are more typical of scientific research (i.e. forming hypotheses, finding confirmation, submitting the hypotheses to tests of “falsifiability” as popularised by Karl Popper, moving on towards new syntheses, and so on ad infinitum), and to engage in the production of goods and services with a careful eye on change, transformation and new forms of equilibrium. Culture of enterprise as a culture of metamorphosis.

Along the way, there will be a need for engineers, chemists, physicists, biologists and mathematicians in numbers much greater than Italian universities are able to produce each year – Italian businesses would need 40,000 more individuals with “technical” degrees such as these – but also a need for philosophers who are able to make sense of the complexity and for humanists able to work with the hallmarks of modern art and to recognise changes in relationships, needs, dreams and their symbols. In other words, we need philosophical engineers just like those that the best in Italian education was traditionally able to provide to Italian businesses, research labs, the markets and the world. Indeed, this is the reasoning behind the decision made some time ago by Politecnico di Milano and Politecnico di Torino – two schools that have trained some of the best Italian executives – to offer sophisticated philosophy courses and to work together with businesses and science foundations, as well as with a great cultural institution like Piccolo Teatro in Milan, on a series of initiatives that have been given the name “Teatro Scienza” (Science Theatre): an exploration of knowledge and theatre.

There are, in fact, words that point to these surprising synergies, words such as “laboratory” used in reference to theatre, education, research and manufacturing: the Piccolo laboratory; the Politecnico laboratory; the Pirelli laboratory. Think, design, do, tell.

This is innovation. Not new technology, but a new way of thinking, a new point of view, new relationships of meaning and story telling. A way of thinking that results in new technologies and makes use of them. Knowledge and tools. The work of philosophical engineers and of the manufacturers who hire them. A “polytechnic Ulysses”.

What do we have to do in order to move on? This is a question being asked with increasing frequency by businesses, organisations and the public at large, and one for which there is no single, simple answer, but rather an answer in multiple parts that includes both technical aspects and a culture of doing business and of living in today’s society.

What we need are tools to help us think differently, tools such as “11 idee per l’Italia” (11 ideas for Italy), which has recently been published by Marsilio and features a foreword by Aldo Bonomi, who writes, “For me, what you hold in your hand is, first and foremost, a collection of trails to the future.” Trails to be followed both by businesses and by the economy in general, all of which start from one observation: what we are dealing with is no mere crisis, but rather an historic division. It’s no longer enough to think in terms of mere growth, but rather of development (something which is much more complex and intriguing).

Venturing forth in this direction with ideas that could up to the task is a group of authors in a class by themselves (in the sense that they all have careers that go beyond just writing) offering up 11 proposals on as many issues, some unusual, in the realms of society and the economy. Take, for example, these ideas: to recycle unused warehouses and other industrial sites for cultural events (Mario Brunello); to test new models of housing in prisons while also giving inmates some extra education (Aldo Cibic); to shift from collective bargaining agreements to individual agreements between employer and employee (Gigi Copiello and Luca Vignaga); to take advantage of major events as drivers of economic development both locally and nationally (Roberto Daneo); to rationalise the actions of local government, along with examples of where this has already been done (Silvia Fattore); to rationalise the fashion industry in Italy to make it more efficient and cost effective (Maria Luisa Frisa); or to work towards greater financial efficiency for Italy’s museum network through better financial management (Guido Guerzoni). But the book also contains proposals on how to “save” Italian banks by tying them to the construction industry through social housing (Massimo Malvestio), how to better “promote” Italy by abandoning stereotypes and looking more towards the nation’s real production (Davide Rampello), how to reuse food waste and give rise to a new segment of manufacturing (Andrea Segrè), or, finally, how it would be possible for Italy to get back to conducting scientific research (Ester Zito).

What results is a dense, stimulating overview in no more than 140 pages showing what could be done to brighten Italy’s outlook on the future, from the economy to culture, from production and the territory to entrepreneurship applied in new and better ways.

In all of this, there is another important passage from Bonomi’s foreword where he speaks of the need to take a close look at the business leaders, at their difficulties and their demands for change, so that they themselves can change and become a new type of leader, one that is able to “take on the burden of transition”.

11 idee per l’Italia

various authors, foreword by Aldo Bonomi

Marsilio, June 2013

The ability to innovate and to increase knowledge in today’s marketplace are two skills that make a business stronger, particularly in the economy we are now experiencing in which standing still is becoming the same as losing ground.  But how are we to innovate and increase our knowledge? First and foremost, we must also ask ourselves if innovation and knowledge methodologies are the same for all, regardless of the type of business involved in the given process of change.

In their study “The relationship between innovation, knowledge, and performance in family and non-family firms: an analysis of SMEs”, published in June in the Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, three researchers at Washburn University (Topeka, Kansas) – David Price, Michael Stoica and Robert J. Boncella – explore this aspect of management of the culture of enterprise.

The study looks into the relationship between innovation and knowledge in both family and non-family businesses and on the impact that this has on business performance and on the approach to making business decisions and is based on an analysis of data on 430 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in a range of industry segments.

The three authors reached a conclusion that might, at first glance, seem obvious, i.e. that innovation and knowledge can truly be sources of competitive advantage for all businesses, but particularly for SMEs. But true success arises from the delicate balance between business administration, a spirit and culture of enterprise, employee engagement, and a focus on technologies and the marketplace. Knowledge, in and of itself, is not enough, nor is innovation detached from the business in which it is to be applied.  Not to mention the fact that, as the authors explain, each business, and each business owner, is able to come up with a unique synthesis of knowledge and innovation, even when starting from the same knowledge base as other businesses and business owners. Perhaps it is here that we see the spirit of a business, in its ability to create something new out of something that already exists.

The relationship between innovation, knowledge, and performance in family and non-family firms: an analysis of SMEs

David Price, Michael Stoica & Robert J. Boncella

Journal of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, June 2013