Creativity and industry: a difficult integration. The role of design as a bond between emotional genius and organized rules in the innovative development of products and services

This contribution focuses on a central theme for the innovation of products and processes in the contemporary industrial organizations: the integration between the creative contribution of the single genius and the organised characteristics typical of mature industrial processes. We are not dealing with a recent problem. The first part of this research crosses the history of the international industrial evolution in a sort of problematic “crescendo” which follows the maturation and crisis of the “classic production system”. The second part identifies several contemporary case studies in which this integration seems to have been successfully achieved. The third part looks at certain design driven tools and processes which can prove to be instrumental in the accomplishment of this difficult integration. Our aim is to prove that an enterprise capable of absorbing a design driven culture is a better environment for the contribution that the genius of external creative subjects can individually or collectively make.