When society is the product. The Olivetti case

The Olivetti brand is associated with some of the objects that define the history of Italian design; but, furthermore, it is associated with a great social effort that took place in “his Ivrea”. At that time, what did it mean to be connected with the territory?
Adriano Olivetti’s utopia was a complex social, political and industrial project, and for a while it made Ivrea into the Athens of Italy. Nowadays the name of Olivetti is associated with impressive achievements in the field of design and architecture; this is a fact that deserves some reflection. But in Olivetti’s vision, design and architecture, that’s to say the design of objects and the design of buildings, did not stand on their own; they were part of a programme of social communication; a platform of international cultural relations, a place for developing innovative solutions that would improve the quality of your life and your work environment. The “Comunità” project summarises best this vision, and it helps define the idea of the industrial society that Olivetti brought forth and popularised. It was a consistent project, from its theoretical foundation to the political proposal built upon experimentation done mostly (but not exclusively) in the Canavese region. This vision of industrial development that today we would call sustainable- was exemplified in great Olivetti projects, like the town planning studies. One of the most famous was the plan for Valle d’Aosta, recently republished by the Fondazione Adriano Olivetti. This comprehensive vision of the territory and its inhabitants has been developed over the years with projects where culture was diffused through networks for example the “Comunità” libraries which are still present and operating in the Canavese region. Importing and spreading this culture in this part of Piedmont, and in other regions that would soon host Olivetti plants was the basis of the Olivetti “social responsibility” plan. In this context, publishing was one more support tool for cultural growth that is why Adriano Olivetti would not complain when users didn’t return books to the library. “This is”, he said, “a form of interest for the book”.
In the same fashion, the Olivetti architecture and in particular the one that we see in factories, referring here of the Pozzuoli plant, was connected to the type of work organisation. The connection was ideological more than functional. I remember that, when in other companies the assembly line ruled, with its attendant fragmentation of the work, Olivetti was introducing the so called “work islands”; every `island’ would complete a complex operation, subdivided among several operator; but every operator was able to execute each phase of the operation.
The Comunità project was also the reason for the birth of many small companies in the Canavese region some of which are still open. 
This was a vision of harmonic coexistence of the factory and the environment, of time spent in the factory and outside the factory, within a self-regulating community network. This is the utopia that Adriano Olivetti tried to make real in the Canavese region and in Southern Italy.

When is a company the expression of a territory? Is there a link between the people who live in an area and the quality of the products made there?
I’ll answer with an example regarding the manufacture of the typewriter.
Assembling the mechanical typewriter required a certain manual ability. An ability not so difficult that it could not be learned by farmers living in the city yet not so simple that could be replicated anywhere. Olivetti succeeded in being very efficient in the manufacture of typewriters and mechanical calculators by leveraging on the relative isolation of the capital of a very homogeneous area like the Canavese region, between the eastern and western Serra, preserving the patrimony of handcrafts. The care taken in keeping the secular links with the land and the agricultural work helped in making work in the factory less alienating while improving the quality of the products; it was in fact company policy to be relaxed in providing days off to attend the needs of farming, according to the pace of seasons.
The Olivetti industrial culture has developed around these simple and ancient rules, respecting the timing of work and the needs of life 
and family.
It was also because of this attention to values that technicians and workers at Olivetti were able to design and build electronic machines: I remember the Programma 101 by Dr Perotto, the first personal computer ever made. In more recent times, again from the Olivetti “tree” gave birth to the first private mobile phone operator, Omnitel.

What does it mean for a community to depend from the fortunes of a company and the where does the social responsibility of the company ends?
Ivrea was always a “company town” maybe more than any Italian city and when Olivetti was a wealthy company, it’s wealth extended to the territory, also because part of the profits where spent to realise the experience of “Comunità”. Thanks to this social wealth Ivrea has not experienced the large immigration of the 1960′ like Turin. With the same development model, which tried to avoid breaking the territorial demographic balances, Olivetti set up the Pozzuoli factories, the Marcianise’s factories, and then went abroad. When the transformation from mechanical to electronic industry began, a radical change of technologies and required skills also occurred. This caused a radical drop in production timings and therefore in assigned staff, which are very expensive activities in terms of human resources. Financial resources had to take place which brought about factory saturation as well as new training for assigned staff and staff reduction. These resources could have perhaps been employed with a larger profit into Innovation.
Although today this process has come to a sort of conclusion, and the Olivetti employees are greatly reduced in number, the city of Ivrea doesn’t show any sign of decline or degradation. Dozens of new initiatives have started, and the unemployment one could have feared is nowhere to be found. The company town projected by Adriano Olivetti has generated a social-economical fabric able to thrive on itself and to walk on its own legs.

A few days ago, the Ferrari president Mr. Luca Cordero of Montezemolo, strongly criticised the Italian management system which in his opinion is not turning out to be innovative enough. What is your opinion about this?
Who amongst us did not once in his life make such observations? Who hasn’t said the opposite? I will try to put them in a context and to insert them in a logic discourse, otherwise it would be too hard to comment on them.
If we look at the quota of innovative products I mean those only recently introduced on the market — among our gross national product, we notice that the latter is diminishing and is inferior to that of the other important European countries. On the other hand, if we look at the number of enterprises that start up each year, or if we look at the creativity of our fashion or automobile designers, we can see that Italy shows outstanding liveliness which only a few other countries can claim to have. I believe that speaking about a stronger or lesser innovation ability cannot be separated from other structural factors: how does credit get allocated/distributed to firms, what is the availability of public richness, what is our approach to professional training, how much investment is aimed for research rather than for the transport system.
Honestly, I still believe that politics is, in Italy, co-responsible for the country’s ability to innovate itself: it is the job of politics to define objectives and to design a scenario, on which everyone can project their own individual projects of personal investment and life. It is in this sense that I see the need for a tighter collaboration between politics and enterprises to seek a common ground for the development and innovation of the country.