Narrow Results

Confronted with fast changing technologies and markets and with increasing competitive pressures, firms are now required to innovate fast and continuously. In order to do so, several firms superpose an intrapreneurial layer (IL) to their formal organization (FO). The two systems are in complex relations: the IL is embedded in the FO, sharing human, financial and technical components, but strongly diverges from it when it comes to representation, structure, values and behavior of the shared components. Furthermore, the two systems simultaneously cooperate and compete. In the long run, the organizational dynamics usually end to the detriment of the intrapreneurial layer, which remains marginal or regresses after an initial period of boom. The concepts of Multiple Systems and Collective Beings, proposed by Minati and Pessa, can help students of the firm adopt a different viewpoint on this issue. These concepts can help them move away from a rigid, Manichean view of the two systems' respective functions and roles towards a more fluid and elaborate vision of their relations, allowing for greater flexibility and coherence.

Humans build, along sequences of states and different emergence property conditions, multiple artifact systems interacting with any eco-system. Such networks and sequences of physical systems have different coherence levels – both internal and external – between themselves as well as with the settled human groups. We call Settlement System such a body of interactions. Architecture – that is, the whole of all the actions that modify human settlement - belongs to a settlement system. The perceptions of basic needs by inhabitants, their behavior as collective beings, the responses to such needs coming from the built environment, underline physical conditions and information flows that determine the actions of collective beings. A "cultural model" can be seen as collective thought, generating coherence in behavior.