The Grammar of Innovation

"Andrea Prencipe and Massimo Sideri write with intelligence, originality, and verve, presenting the ideas of Italo Calvino in the context of the forces shaping our world. The Grammar of Innovation provides insights that are timely and timeless and are an important contribution to our understanding of innovation." Alec Ross, Nyt best-selling author, professor, entrepreneur and former senior advisor to Hillary Clinton "Tension, paradox, and oppositional forces have been a vital part of understanding innovation since the time when Joseph Schumpeter first coined the phrase "Creative Destruction". This book by Prencipe and Sideri more gracefully and elegantly explores these attributes than any book I've ever seen. Italo Calvino, the inspiration for this work, would have been pleased to see his ideas embraced and adapted for our time. The authors convincingly demonstrate the power of playing with ideas, and allowing tensions to have their day, so that new, generative possibilities might arise that otherwise would have been missed. Savor this book, yet drink deeply at the same time!" Henry Chesbrough, Maire Tecnimont Professor of Open Innovation and Sustainability, Luiss University, and author of Open Innovation In Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino elaborated on six concepts or memos to offer insights on the ‘shapes of things to come’, which were lightness, rapidity, exactness, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. To do so, the Italian writer embraced an interdisciplinary approach to describe each concept through juxtaposition of its antonyms, heaviness, slowness, indeterminacy, invisibility, uniqueness, and inconsistency. Inspired by Calvino’s intuition, this book puts forward the notion of the ‘Calvino Method’ to interpret the inner dynamics of innovation processes. Drawing on literature and cases from the fields of innovation, history of technology, organisation theory and corporate strategy, the book elaborates on each of the six concepts to offer a unique angle to understand innovation as technological, organisational and cultural change that generates value across a variety of domains. The linguistic juxtapositions at the root of the Calvino Method forms the framework of The Grammar of Innovation and the tension between opposites, which at first seems insoluble, emerges as the catalyst of future thought. This book will be of great interest to scholars of innovation, strategy, organisation studies, philosophy of business, and all those with an interest in the works of Italo Calvino. Andrea Prencipe is the Rector as well as Professor of Organisation and Innovation at Luiss University in Rome, Italy. His research focuses on innovation-related issues in organisations and higher education institutions and on project-based organising. His works have been published widely in books and journals and he sits on several editorial boards. His writings regularly appears in national and international newspapers. Massimo Sideri is a correspondent and columnist for the newspaper Corriere della Sera, writing on innovation, science and economics. He is the former Editor-in-Chief and founder of Corriere Innovazione, a monthly magazine focused on innovation. He is an Adjunct Professor of Socio-Economic History of Innovation at Luiss University. He has authored a variety of books and received several journalism awards.