What does beauty have to do with innovation? The Italian case

The Italian approach to beauty is a fascinating case of innovative thinking. What beauty? you might ask (beauty is not an Italian possession, but certainly Italians have a particular understanding for it). And what kind of innovation? What I argue here is that Italy’s obsession for aesthetics represents a fundamental ingredient of entrepreneurial success.

Before diving into our reflection, we need to clarify what characterizes Italian beauty. Here are 4 qualities  - know-how, heritage, diversity, and cultural imagination - plus an addendum.

Know how. Doing well. The idea of perfection over profit. Doing completely (from the Latin “per-ficere” for doing at its best). Tradition and craft are fundamental to achieve this ideal. As we see in the Italian system of the bottega, knowledge can be acquired only by experience and mastery through the personal communication of a planning/executing ability. Such power of making is rooted in the power of enjoying. So, savoir faire is intimately related to savoir vivre. It follows that an object well-done is also an object well-lived, able to become life, lifestyle.

Heritage. A living patrimony, not a museum of immobile finds. Heritage is about value, as both responsibility and appreciation of diversity. Responsibility means evaluating and investing in preserving a given and making it intelligible for future use. In this sense, appreciation (and not a generic inclusion) of the heterogeneous forces and cultures coming from the past is needed for a patrimony to truly live on.

Diversity. Such dialogue with the past requires esteem of diverse forms. Such esteem takes form in Italy through contemplation and negotiation. The contemplation of space as the theatre of human action and a key difference creator, and the negotiation of differences and plural identities, as we see in the architecture of the piazza as a site of co-existence, constant mediation (even of rivalries), competition (think of the Palio in Siena), and pursuit of primacy. In a nation of capital cities (the fortified cities, the Courts), beauty becomes a key stimulus of differentiation, self-affirmation, and excellence. Beauty ultimately coincides with the virtue of temperance as the art of reconciling distinct voices and co-existing forms in harmony, not according to a measure of compromise, but to a just measure.

Lastly, cultural imagination. Aesthetic creativity is a space of continuous experimentation, play, and self-adjustment; a platform for developing multi-sensorial experiences in the hybridization of senses and languages (as we see in opera); and a laboratory where different ways of living are continuously absorbed or translated.

We could add other elements to explain Italian beauty – porosity, polyglotism, the creative use of limited resources – but, if I were to single out (and it’s impossible I know) the one element that synthesizes it I would personally choose the horror vacui, the fear of emptiness. The sense of a space that cannot be void – of meaning, of human presence, of emotional connection, of dialogue with others. The sense of a space that always ‘needs’ to tell a story. You’ll realize this by seeing how many walls, objects or spaces are always decorated, designed.

What does this have to do with innovation? Two classic works introduce us to a possible answer. In his Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker explains that innovating is transforming something into a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man endows it with value. Bauxite made the soil infertile until Bayer found a way to extract aluminum in 1887, and the penicillin mold was a pest until Fleming saw in it a bacterial killer in the 1920s. So, to innovate is to create value. In his seminal work Change by Design, Tim Brown, identifies innovation with design thinking, or rather with its integrated, human-centered, experiential approach to problem solving. Against a purely technologic view, Brown sees design as a form of thought that shapes not just an object, but also its surrounding space, its connected experience, and life itself. By way of its ability to create an emotional connection with the user, design is not just a means to acquire insights from experience or the customer base, but rather a way to tell a story. The designer then is ultimately a storyteller. Like a book, an object is the epicenter of emotional interaction and the creator of value. It follows then that the innovator or an entrepreneur is ultimately an artist, who sees a story, a value, in the rather anarchic fabric of our daily lives, and charges it with a meaning, a purpose.

Against this backdrop, what does the Italian aesthetic model bring? How does Italian beauty trigger innovative thinking? Let’s go back to its 4 characteristics. Know how relates to perfection. What is done well –the obsession for details, the tension to not leave an empty space – relates to the integral development of a product, which connects the manufacturer to the customer at a deep level. Heritage is about depth. Grounding the product in a story, not just in the present trend. Leaving a mark for when we’ll no longer be here. Diversity is about balance and temperance. Not a myopic focus on one element or detail, but rather the ability to place plural elements within a broader horizon, and the disposition to find new voices out of the interaction of languages. Cultural imagination is what makes a product genuine and relevant. In opera, or in Renaissance palaces, painting, decorating, storytelling, composing, designing are ways to attract attention, to transform an object or a space into an event. When we buy a product, we also want to be part of an experience, of a world of meaning, of a story, and cultural imagination is what makes that story genuine, real, grounded. Authentic. So, perfection, depth, balance, authenticity. These are key ingredients in the design of innovations that last. These characteristics embody an idea of innovation not as a volatile pursuit of novelties for the sake of novelties, but rather as a creative journey, as an impresa—the Italian word for both adventurous feat and entrepreneurship.

How does this Italian ideal of beauty apply to a successful impresa? To start, the mingling of arts, culture, and industry that is typical of the Italian milieu represents a perfect example of design thinking, that is, of a visual, embodied, spatialized, and human-centered thinking. The pre-eminence of visual languages (so the primacy of painting), the craft of a visible hand (in the longstanding tradition of the botteghe), the architecture of space (in the staging of piazzas or in the spatial theatrical setting of melodrama), and the importance of the humanistic tradition are but a few signs that confirm this Italian way of thinking. But why does this matter? What does it produce? This visual, manual, spatial, and experiential approach is key to creating an emotional connection between the producer and the user, which does not leave the object (a book or a product) in a vacuum, and ultimately turns it into an event, into a lively epicenter of relations and connections.

It follows that the Italian inter-connectedness of arts and porosity in absorbing different languages and traditions nurtures an integrated approach to the product, which aspires to define new solutions out of the overlapping of spaces, and the cross-pollination of disciplines. Opera is a good image for this, in its fusion of text, music, stage and costume design, acting, into one unique, unrepeatable, and unforgettable event. Poetry, as a central form of communication in Italian culture, also mirrors this phenomenon. The ancients represented poetry with the symbol of the bee to indicate its nature as an experimental synthesis of flowers (anthology in Greek means collection of flowers), or as the creative platform for the cross-pollination of disciplines into broader, unexpected solutions.

Lastly, the Italian pursuit of beauty, as an intricate balance of limit and quest for perfection, gives entrepreneurs a strange mix of realism and resourcefulness, experience and imagination, temperance and risk, which is key in manageably transforming problems into projects. Limit, embracing constraints, is a source of creativity and the pursuit of perfection is a quest for harmony of different voices. If you think of Italy’s co-presence of secular, pagan, and religious forces, its ability to incorporate foreign influences, its geographic and economic constraints, the Italian ideal of beauty, as a creative self-overcoming and an endless pursuit of timeless perfection, can offer a significant alternative to the dictatorship of novelty, the infinite diversification of products, or the ephemerality of commercial or technological trends.

These are some preliminary and by necessity rapid considerations which might give a sense of the impact of Italian arts and culture on Italy’s industry. The Italian Innovators project (webpage: www.italianinnovators.com) offers concrete examples of this aesthetic and entrepreneurial attitude through profiles, interviews, and lessons. Check out the YouTube channel at https://bit.ly/italianinnovators to know more about the project and subscribe to receive notification of new episodes. Thanks for reading!