In present times companies and organizations must be able to sustain a continuous innovation process, whose management is the most important activity in the company. Managers should dedicate their efforts to understand how to improve this process, without wasting too much time in enforcing the respect of fixed rules or precise procedures.

Applying a complexity perspective to innovation leads to a peculiar emphasis on:

• interactions between agents, and between agents and artefacts
• emergence of new artefact functionalities
• emergence of new entities (out of recurrent interactions between pre-existing actors)
• role of scaffolding structures to support innovation processes
• cascade of changes in the functionality of artefacts and in the role of agents
• the way in which managers face situations of very high uncertainty and take their decisions (narrative theory of action)

All these aspects are treated in the section on the case studies, so we will limit ourselves here to this brief summary. The interested reader may also look at the results of the EU-funded project ISCOM (www.iscom.unimo.it) which has been devoted to this topic.

Besides its theoretical interest, practical indications can be drawn from this perspective on innovation, including e.g. ways to identify those relationships which may lead to the emergence of new functionalities, or suggestions about how to make convincing cases based on appropriate narratives.