Developing innovative visions by absorbing new interpretations from radical circles

This thesis focus on design driven innovation, the innovation approach that creates products with radically new meanings (compared to those dominant in the market). Its main purpose is transmitting to customers new reasons to buy products. Companies can collaborate with external interpreters to understand how people could give meaning to things. The knowledge developed through this investigation of reality feeds a process through which the company creates its own vision and its own proposal. This thesis has been written as an attempt to clarify the role of a particular external source a business organization can leverage on when willing to propose a new vision: radical circles. Restricted groups of individuals that collaborate beyond formal organizational structures which start to explore new avenues, typically in clear contrast to the prevailing dominant rules in their industry. This thesis aims to study the role of radical circles in the development of innovative visions in business organizations, in particular, how business organizations capture the value provided by new interpretations developed by radical circles, define their own vision and push it in the marketplace making a proposal to people. In order to address this dissertation’s aim and according to a theoretical background, it has been built a framework to map and analyze six case studies. Through a cross analysis, the transverse elements to the different cases have been identified and discussed in relation to the surveyed literature. The empirical setting is three circles of radicals (Slow Food, Memphis, Free Software Foundation) and six corresponding business initiatives that were generated (innovative projects in Coop, Barilla, Olivetti Synthesis, Swatch, Red Hat, Netscape). The findings from the study show how radical circles affect the vision development by influencing a change of paradigms in the business organization, affecting the choice of which new competencies and values to develop, influencing the business organization in choosing how to push its innovative vision in the market. Case studies analysis suggests that the radical circles influence the vision development in a business organization mainly through intellectual/human capital (people of the circle and their knowledge, training, and experience. Judgment, insight, creativity, social skills and relationships, vision, values, beliefs and intelligence of the individual members of the circle) or organizational capital (structures, group of people, routines, systems, rules, norms, policies). Capital transitions are possible trough projects or direct lasting collaboration with single members of the circle or the circle itself, enabling to nurture the company with the radical circle competencies and values.