The Evolution of Knowledge Organization: The Emergence of Innovation Platform in the Turin Car System.

The paper aims at explaining the changes in how economic actors and their organizations acquire and coordinate innovative and productive capabilities. Through the illustrative evidence of organizational change occurred in the automobile industry in the area of Turin over the last 50 years, the paper describes how transformations in the structure of interactions between firms are steered by the modification in the pattern of specialization and differentiation in the capabilities and technological skills of economic actors. The automobile system in Turin is character ized by the emergence of a distributed innovation platform, which is seen as a major innovation in the organization of innovation and technological knowledge in the system.