From "Community as Concrete Utopia" to "Harmonic Innovation": a historical approach to entrepreneurial innovation.

The paper aims to bring out a coherent research program on harmonic innovation as a process of developing an “unconventional” form of business venturing. As a particular form of “entrepreneurial innovation”, where “agency is ‘translated’ through social and material networks” and “contexts are constituted through performative effort”, the “harmonic innovation” represents a “creation of new enterprises”. The process of “translation” that Entopan’s “harmonic innovation” and Olivetti’s “community as concrete utopia” seem to share manifests itself by (re)configuring, sometimes unexpectedly, three dimensions of analysis: “the domains of sustainability, responsibility, and ethics […], centred on responsible management phenomena observed in extending spheres around the responsible manager [job, group, organization, occupation, and planetary society], and [in which] salient themes of research are (a) responsible management praxis, practices and process(es), (b) learning, change and innovation, and (c) alternative management framework”. This specific mapping of the phenomenon of “responsible management” provides the interpretative framework that enables the formulation of a possible research agenda for the “emerging” phenomenon (harmonic innovation), compared to the historical “comparison” of the “established” phenomenon (the Olivetti community).