INNOVATION TRAJECTORIES. Retracing the History of Area-Based Initiatives

In the diffusion of area-based initiatives in Europe, a strong emphasis was placed on innovation as both a prerequisite and a result of the work carried out by professionals. However, even when innovation in design and other professional practices has occurred, it has rarely been the result of voluntary and planned actions. Research conducted today allows us to bring to the fore not only the contextualization of innovative practices in a wider collective but also to question how they spread over the long run through formal and informal processes. Drawing on the history of three area-based programs developed between the 1980s and 2000s, this text aims to interrogate the actual conditions and modalities of innovation in design practices and their impacts in different professional and institutional contexts. In particular, the relationship between individual learning and collective capitalization is investigated as a fundamental dimension in order to assess the potential of innovative design practices to overcome the specific contingencies of a project.