Innovazione tecnologica e organizzazione: trend, aree di ricerca e prospettive internazionali e italiane

Over the years theoretical perspectives and empirical research on technological innovation have developed together with theoretical and empirical studies on organization. However, after a great deal of attention devoted to technology in organization studies in the 50s of the last century, there has been a decreasing interest about this topic. Aiming to contribute to the debate on technological innovation, organization and work, a search in the ISI Web of Science platform was performed using the keyword “technolog* innovation*” and looking at 89 journals identified from three complementary groups of journals. To analyze the 1028 scientific retrieved contributions, published between 1985 and 2013, a bibliometric analysis has been conducted, adopting also Social Network Analysis tools. The analysis on the whole dataset was supplemented by the study of the subset of the Italian contributions - i.e. those in which at least one author was affiliated with an Italian university - in order to point out the peculiarities of the research on technological innovation conducted by Italian scholars. The results obtained for both the whole sample and the Italian one reveal a significant growth of the technological innovation literature over the investigated period, the multidisciplinary of the field, the relevance of management and business & economics contributions, but in particular the necessity and opportunity to investigate the role of technological innovation within the organizational life.