Roberto Verganti studies focus on management of innovation.
His research aims at understanding how firm can successfully conceive and manage innovation, and in particular radical innovations driven by technology and design.
His research is conducted at the School of Management of Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy and in cooperation with scholars in other disciplines, countries and schools, especially with colleagues at the Harvard Business School and Copenhagen Business School.

His more recent studies focus on:

Design-Driven innovation

Collaborative Innovation

Technological Innovation in Rapidly Moving Environments

Research and Innovation Policy

Design-driven innovation. How firms can change the rules of competition by radically innovating what their products and services mean? How can they detect subtle changes in the socio-cultural and business context and propose new product meanings that meet the unexpressed aspirations of people? Roberto started in the late ’90s to investigate successful innovation practices in Italian design-intensive manufacturers such as Alessi, Artemide and Kartell (part of this research has been conducted in cooperation with the Faculty of Design of Politecnico di Milano, within the research project Sistema Design Italia, which in 2001 was awarded the “Compasso d’oro”, the most prestigious deisng award in Italy). In 10 years the sample has been progressively enlarged to include firms of different sizes in different industries, countries, and markets (consumer and industrial, niche and high volume), in products and in services. The research demonstrates that radical innovation of product meanings – which leads to products with long lives, significant, sustainable profit margins, brand value, and company growth – hardly starts from a close observation of user needs and requirements. “User-centered” innovation indeed does not question existing meanings but rather further reinforces them. Instead, rather than getting close to users, breakthrough firms follow a different strategy: design driven innovation. They take a broader perspective by investigating the evolution of culture, society and technologies, and make proposals, putting forward a vision about possible new product meanings that people have not solicited but that they were eventually just waiting for. The research also shows that the capability to successfully propose breakthrough meanings is built by leveraging on external interpreters (firms in other industries that target the same users, suppliers of new technologies, researchers, designers, and artists etc…) who share its same problem: to understand the evolution of socio-cultural models and technologies, and propose new visions and meanings. What these companies understand is that knowledge about meanings is diffused throughout their external environment, that they are immersed in a collective research laboratory where interpreters pursue their own investigations and are engaged in a continuous mutual dialogue. The process of design-driven innovation therefore entails getting close to interpreters. It leverages their ability to understand and influence how people could give meaning to things. Firms that realize design-driven innovations are capable of detecting, attracting, and interacting with key interpreters better than their competitors. Roberto’s research in this field has been published on severak journals including the Journal of Product Innovation Management and the Harvard Business Review and in the book “Design-Driven Innovation”, Harvard Business Press, 2009, selected by BusinessWeek as one of the best Innovation and Design books of 2009. [top]

Collaborative Innovation. Together with Gary Pisano, of the Harvard Business School, Roberto has investigated strategies to leverage networks of external parties. Gary and Roberto have demonstrated that notwithstanding the fervor around open models of collaboration such as crowdsourcing, there is no best approach to leveraging the power of outsiders. Collaborative innovation takes a wide variety of forms which involve different strategic trade-offs. They have developed a framework for examining those trade-offs, which focuses on two questions: How open or closed should membership in a network of collaborators be? How flat or hierarchical should the network’s governance structure be? This leads to four basic modes of collaboration, each characterized by distinct trade-offs. Innovation Malls, Innovation Communities, Elite circles (such us the network of interpreters of design-driven innovation), and Consortia. The research identifies the advantages and challenges of each mode and their enablers, i.e. the organizational and infratsuctural capabilities that firms have to develop to successfully implement them. The research also shows that firms may properly combine different forms of collaboration according to the innovation problem at hand, and that they must continuously revisit this architecture of collaborations as their strategies evolve. This framework has been published in the article by Gary Pisano and Roberto Verganti, “Which kind of collaboration is right for you?”, Harvard Business Review, 2008. Novel investigation is focusing on how to create elite networks of talents in science and technology based businesses. How firms can identify and attract into collaborations the best external scientists and engineers before and better than their competitors? [top]

Technological innovation in rapidly moving environment. How firms may develop products in rapidly moving contexts where technology is a major driver for competition? How can they manage the uncertainty of an evolving technological and market landscape? Early studies in this field, conducted in cooperation with Marco Iansiti and Alan MacCormack from the Harvard Business School, have investigated firms in the Internet software industry (such as Microsoft, Netscape, Yahoo!, Intuit, etc.). They explored how this firms where able, in the late ’90s, to develop products by adopting a flexible process, instead of a more rigid stage-gate sequences of phases, with an intense use of experimentation and interaction with users. This study has been published on Management Science. His more recent investigation is focusing on flexible innovation is high-tech services. [top]

Research and innovation policy. Roberto Verganti has leveraged on his studies on innovation processes and management practices, to explore how policies may help firms to better pursue their strategic growth. How policy makers may define effective research and innovation policies that are particularly suitable for the firms of their territory? How Public Research Organizations may better interact with firms and commercialize their science and technology? In particular, the focus of his research is policy planning, foresight, performance measurement of research and technology transfer, commercialization of science and technology. In this field Roberto Verganti has cooperated with the OECD and with several national and regional governments around the world and in Italy. He has coordinated the working group that has developed the “Strategic programme for research and innovation” of Regione Lombardia, Italy. [top]