Purpose: In a world where innovation became a “buzzword” and everyone within companies is required to foster innovation, the engagement of people toward innovation is fundamental to prompt individual motivation and actions to make innovation happen. However, despite the relevance of the...

Purpose – The main objective of this article is to propose an interpretive model that attempts to decipher a product's values in terms of functionality, usability and meaning. This model can support companies in better integrating these values in their product offering and in defining the most...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the organizational aspects of an open innovation approach by focusing on the relationship between universities and firms as a vehicle for acquiring technological knowledge. It discusses in detail the characteristics of firm organizational...

Purpose – New technology‐based firms (NTBFs) play a growing role in national economies. Given their nature, it is possible to suppose that these companies should manage their development processes by leveraging on flexibility. Thus, the main purpose of the paper is to understand to what...

Purpose – Nowadays, the strategic role of design is reinforced by the increased attention that customers pay to the aesthetic, symbolic and emotional values of products. These values can be communicated through the appropriate combination of product signs (such as form, colours, materials and...

Purpose – Product functionalities aim to satisfy the operative needs of the customer, while product meanings (i.e. the emotion and the symbolic values represented by the product) aim to satisfy the emotional and socio‐cultural needs of the customer. What consumers are increasingly looking...

Purpose The importance and complexity of proposing radically new meanings are well-established in the literature. However, a limited number of contributions have analyzed how they can be developed. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the development of radically new meanings at the basis of...

Purpose Notwithstanding the importance innovation scholars have accredited to design-driven innovation (DDI), no attempts have been made so far to systematically study whether and how this innovation strategy can be used in the retail context in order to gain and nurture competitive advantage....