Abstract

The article introduces a case of innovation, that took place in the Brianza wood and furniture industrial district, during the course of interaction between two craftsmen with materials, prototypes, rendering and a product manager from a relevant furniture design company based in the very district. Through a detailed description of these interactions, taking into account their corporal and sensitive features, authors want to show how tacit knowledge is deployed within the interorganisational relations and how this process can lead to innovation. The adoption of an Actor-network theory approach leads authors to consider not how knowledge circulates within a network, but rather how knowledge emerges, reverberates and transforms through the very rearticulating process of the network. It has been possible to show such dynamic thanks to the fact that not only relations among different interorganisational actors, but also the "network within" certain actors - the two craftsmen and the pieces on which they worked - have been taken into account.