Andrea Prencipe is an organizational scholar and former rector of Luiss University – Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli in Rome. He is known for his studies on innovation, organizational transformation and learning processes in businesses and universities. In this interview, Prencipe reflects on the need for a “grammar of innovation,” inspired by Italo Calvino’s American Lessons, and the challenges that universities and businesses face in educating, transforming and innovating.
Professor, you propose a “grammar of innovation” inspired by Italo Calvino’s American Lessons. Why Calvino specifically? And how can his literary vision help us understand and manage technological and organizational change?
Because Calvin is innovation. He was a great innovator: he experimented with methods, styles, languages and approaches. He considered himself the black sheep of his family: because it was composed only of scientists! This exposed him from a young age to the sciences, naturally educating him in interdisciplinary thinking. He read biology, computer science-which in his day was in its infancy-and apparently bought Scientific American every month for inspiration, what today we would call a “prompt.”
In our book we propose the “Calvino method.” When he tackled a concept, Calvino always did so by exploring its opposite as well: lightness, for example, is analyzed along with heaviness. The last lesson, the one not written down but left in fragments, also revolves around consistency. Calvin quotes Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, where the protagonist dies precisely of excessive consistency. It is an invitation, I would say, to be consistently inconsistent, to live and reinvent oneself.
In the book, innovation is referred to as a tension between opposites: destruction and creation, past and future, exactitude and imagination. How does this dialectic translate within a company or university?
The book emphasizes the importance of awareness: innovation emerges among and thrives on tension. Calvin would say that technology is fast, while science is slow. And we human beings are even more so. We love comfort zones, routines, the status quo; we are naturally resistant to change, to innovation.
However, innovations, however fast, must be adopted by us humans in order to have a social and economic impact. Therefore, the process of adopting innovations is crucial: innovation, in fact, is not just a technological fact, but a phenomenon of social-anthropological change.
The importance of pedagogy in this process was mentioned. What do you think are the obstacles in the corporate and university system today?
Obstacles often arise from the entrenchment of rules, institutions, and practices that belong to a particular historical moment. Rules are fundamental, but innovation also requires new rules. The innovator, after all, is the one who creates new rules.
Thomas Kuhn talked about “normal innovation” within a scientific paradigm, but radical innovation creates a new paradigm. Think of the people who created Airbnb: they completely redefined the hotellerie without owning a single hotel. It is an example of “creative destruction,” as Schumpeter would say.
Who legitimizes these new rules?
The market and the institutions. They are the ones who recognize them and sanction their validity.
But isn’t there a risk that it is precisely the market and institutions that want to keep the old rules?
Yes, the risk exists. And some of it is also natural: maintaining the status quo also means protecting what makes us human. But we have to evolve. The very meaning of being sapiens changes over time. That’s why it’s important to grasp novelty without distorting ourselves, maintaining – as Calvin would have said – our “jealously human” traits.
In the university context, it means educating girls and boys in critical thinking, the ability to discern. On the one hand through experimentation with technologies-such as artificial intelligence-on the other hand by returning to the humanities, which represent the essence of humanity.
Academy and business are often perceived as opposing worlds. Is this really the case? And where do they touch or collide?
They are different worlds, of course. Business pursues profit-which must, however, be increasingly socialized. The university has the task of education. But they must work together, respecting different areas of responsibility.
Today it is no longer only the university that produces knowledge: businesses, institutions do it as well. That is why it is essential to find common ground, even if it is constantly changing. The university must educate to learn and unlearn, prepare girls and boys to reinvent themselves. Businesses, for their part, must be quick and market-ready. Thus, the university can focus on knowledge; the enterprise, on skills. Two dimensions that complement each other.
The article Andrea Prencipe and his Calvin-inspired “grammar of innovation” comes from TheNewyorker.
