ABSTRACT
Introduction A major problem in research on innovations is the understanding of creativity, that is, the origins of innovations. A widespread interpretation is that the innovation processes are local recombinations of current capabilities, a claim originating on the Schumpeter researches (see also March 1991). On the other side, it is possible to consider creativity as a sudden blind insight. The latter perspective yields little theoretical and conception gain, but – in our opinion – also a theory explaining innovation as a pure recombination of already existing methodologies fails to treat the many cases of significant creativity it is possible to observe. In particular, while this perspective can explain the genesis of the ‘better, faster and cheaper’ innovations, it is not able to describe the so called radical innovation, whose origin and scope is not directly linked with the current events. The key point seems to us that those approaches lack an appropriate ontology. In particular, the sudden blind insight perspective takes into consideration only human beings (and only as black boxes), whereas the second point of view emphasizes the role of artifacts, leaving the agents (human beings, or groups of human beings) a secondary role of pure recombinators: it becomes in such a way possible to ignore the role of agents and follow the pure technological trajectories of the artifacts. On the contrary, we claim that both agents and artifacts matter. In fact, human agents – which are endowed with sophisticated cognitive and communication capabilities – can create and use artifacts in ways which are not obvious at all. Moreover, they are embedded in a web of relationships among themselves, with their organizations and with their environment which affect their ways of thinking and of using artifacts. Making (new) artifacts or generating (new) forms of organization in a society, is a multifaceted process that is based on recurrent sets of actions, in which a number of agents with different roles are involved. In this process, new concepts and objects are discovered and invented by simultaneously surveying the opportunities offered by the social and material environment, and adapting the existing categorizations of the agents. The (new) artifacts allow the development of the (new) recurrent sets of actions, that in time create (new) paths and opportunities.
