Writing and reading innovative organizations. An empirical research on vertical dance

The present economic and financial crisis stressed the focus on innovation as a key process, imagined to support organizations facing the problem of how to produce value in a radically changed milieu. Given this context, the management literature has been looking for innovative practices, investigating those contexts where words such as change, subversion of traditions and innovation have been given a strategic role. This happens, among the others, in artistic productions, where the artist’s creative process has a deeply innovative nature (Frankelius, 2011). The present study aims to investigate the processes of value creation taking place in one of these artistic organizations: Il Posto, an Italian company of vertical dance founded by Wanda Moretti. The choice of Wanda Moretti as an object of observation has a double meaning. As a dancer and a choreographer, her creative process is made of creative thinking and action, such as thinking and action are the main components of the managerial perspective. Secondly, her artistic project is an innovative project in the perspective of modern dance. We then aim to observe and identify the innovative dimension of her language, analysing the processes through which her creative thinking takes place, inducing action. The paper adopted a qualitative approach, using a process of interpretation based on a narrative model. To explore this narrative dimension, giving room to the interpretation of the processes in the specific context where they took place, the case study has been followed by three in-depth observations, where three main activities of the choreographer have been put under the lens of a conceptual microscope. The paper ends with the identification of the main processes, through which innovation takes place in the context of observation.