Abstract
Within innovative companies competing in the globalized market we can observe two distinct phenomena characterizing their changes with respect to the past: the proliferation of organizational networks and the raise of a new profile of top manager/entrepreneur that has been called business designer. Scholars and practitioners are paying great attention to these two phenomena in order to characterize them and to improve their reproducibility. Since business designers are characterized mostly for their way to design and develop innovation at the level of products, services and customers relationships, while organizational networks are seen as transformers of the organization of innovative companies, there has been little or no attention to the mutual relations binding the two phenomena. In this paper I propose some first hints on how business designers promote or should promote networks and suggest that organizational networks are necessary for doing business design. The last sections discuss how Information and Communication Technology can support the effectiveness of networks and suggest the technological innovation that should accompany the raise of business designers.
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Acknowledgements
The origin of this paper has been a Seminar I gave in April 2016 within the Master in World Natural Heritage Management (WNHM-Master) in Trento. There I presented, for the first time, my reflections about the business designer as a manager of an organization. My long lasting collaboration with Federico Butera has been of paramount importance in the development of the ideas presented here about organizational networks. I studied collaborative networks doing research in CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work). It was, finally, with Emilio Genovesi, Giovanni Lanzone and Giulio Ceppi that I designed the Master in Business Design at Domus Academy at the beginning of this century. To all the people I have nominated, and to the many more that contributed to my work with suggestions and discussions, goes my sincere appreciation. The responsibility of what is written in these pages is only mine.
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De Michelis, G. (2018). Business Designers, Organizational Networks and ICT. In: Rossignoli, C., Virili, F., Za, S. (eds) Digital Technology and Organizational Change. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62051-0_2
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