With fascinating examples from leading European and American companies, Roberto Verganti shows that for truly breakthrough products and services, we must look beyond customers and users to those he calls 'interpreters' - the experts who deeply understand and shape the markets they work in

Gives results of a survey on the application of the just‐in‐time (JIT) approach in Italy, based on a sample of 173 industrial companies. The methodological framework used to evaluate JIT application was described in a previous article ( International Journal of Operations & Production...

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 – 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...