Il valore del Design per il B2B in Industria 4.0 Design tools per le imprese produttrici di beni strumentali.

This research focuses on Industrial Design extension as a strategic tool for industrial equipment companies. Though there is no scientific debate concerning this Design phenomenon, the empirical data analysis and our consultancy work in the last few years, underline a rising trend. Industrial design is becoming essential to automation and machine tool companies. Design discipline has broadly faced issues concerning product design process and today product designer efforts keep going toward this direction; their sensitivity in managing the fragile network of stakeholder relationships inside a project is well known and almost essential. These statements are surely true for consumer markets but quite hasty for industrial equipments B2B markets: effectiveness of Design practice within this specific sector has been scarcely investigated. The scientific objective is to analyze the inclusion of design cultures in B2B industrial enterprises, mostly alien to this culture, comparing it with similar phenomena investigated appropriately and bring out the similarities that can be recognized as a success parameter of the asset. Ultimately is proposed a definition of a best practice for the transformation of the company's innovation process, so that the research of design driven innovation becomes transferable to other local SMEs.