Quickness

Like the juxtaposition between Mercure’s quickness and Vulcan’s slowness as put forward by Calvino to depict the job of the writer that requires different, yet complementary approaches to time and timing, the unfolding of innovation processes requires both the long, painstaking, patient work of scientific discoveries and the rapid intuition of entrepreneurs to bring the new idea to the market and make innovation happen. The Calvino’s Method—we argue—may help analyse and indicate the importance of governing the uneven time dynamics that characterise corporate strategies as well as technological developments. Organising and managing innovation indeed require awareness—and capability to harness efforts—of a variety of actors whose time horizons as well as their approaches to timing greatly differ. Also, scientific developments and technological progresses followed uneven time dynamics: science is slow, technology is rapid: indeed, the rapidity of the development of the vaccine against Covid-19 leveraged the slowness and patience that permeated the development of the basic scientific fields. Additionally, different technological fields are characterised by different and uneven time dynamics. The generative—yet balancing—tension between quickness and slowness constitutes another building block of a grammar of innovation.