After the events that took it into Telecom world, Olivetti is now reclaiming its tradition with a fresh boost to Italian information technology. The strong points of the comeback: brand strength, Ink Jet technology, synergy with mobile telephone research and the innovative products designed by IDEO and the newly formed team James Irvine and Alberto Meda. Text by Aldo Bonomi. Photography by Ramak Fazel. Edited by Francesca Picchi.

The new economy is a powerful force. More than for its technology, it is remembered for the hot bubble of that lightest and heaviest of goods: money. Into the black hole of the world’s stock markets it sucked thousands of investors accustomed to seeing their savings guaranteed by the solid building of the nation-state, now itself fading away. What's more, it crept into our anthropology. It got us into the habit of thinking that the new goods are some how inside our naked life, our thinking, our communication, our memory, even our DNA.

That is what the technologies of communication and biotech are all about. Indeed, companies took it upon themselves to be the guarantors of privacy and divided up the embryo. In more practical terms, it involved financial risk for those historic businesses and brands that incorporated technological innovation into their products. Yet many looked on with sadness when Olivetti was reduced to a pure financial vehicle for Telecom Italia’s ascent. People wondered what was left of the Italian industrial landscape once a leader with Olivetti’s design and technological capabilities - the mythic Lettera 22 typewriter, the Divisumma calculator, the communication pieces and furnishings for the 20th-century Fordist factory – had exited the scene.

We all knew that Olivetti had not managed or wished to take the technological plunge into post-Fordism. As a result, it lost the global battle for a new machine (the ordinateur as the French called it) that could combine writing, calculation and communication, a single machine devised not only for offices but for people, i.e. the personal computer. From an industrial standpoint the trauma was even worse because Adriano Olivetti had experimented with communitarian capitalism in Italy’s Canavese region around Ivrea. It was a mild Fordism based on the factory-territory relationship that had spread across the Canavese valleys. Using a transport network, it allowed workers to stay in their towns and villages without having to be concentrated in Ivrea. He even endowed local communities with public libraries and experimented in the factory with industrial relations based not on conflict but on co-management.

This approach was in great contrast to the hard Fordism found in the company town of Turin. Even without having read Le mosche del capitale by Paolo Volponi, a collaborator of Adriano’s, everybody knows that Olivetti was truly a laboratory of design technology and a business paradigm for the whole of Italian industry. But once it was caught up in the new economy, things began to unravel. On the one hand, work in telephony was going well but the technological and production heritage was behind. Many companies like the Pirelli-backed Telecom Italia were involved in the rationalisation of their various businesses during this period. But today from this group we see an important signal emerging.

The Olivetti trademark is to be relaunched onto the market not as a financial vehicle but as the producer of goods incorporating technology. Three new printers (two designed by James Irvine and Alberto Meda, and one by IDEO) will be introduced in September and to compete directly with major global brands such as Epson, HP, Canon and Lexmark. Additionally, there is a proposal to develop a network of printers linked to mobile phones, thus achieving a real industrial connection with the Telecom group. This is possible because at Arnad, where the Canavese becomes Val d’Aosta, a technological pole has remained.

Specially modified atmospheric chambers house the entire production cycle to produce silicone and the printer heads. Furthermore, the Olivetti brand still continues to be a strong force in the world thanks to a lively global sales network and, most importantly, because its design gives products a competitive edge. Olivetti’s relaunch is an important signal for the local territory and the city because in the Canavese there is also the Bioindustry Park at Colleretto Giacosa, where the Bracco R&D centre is located. The three new printers in production along with the Bioindustry Park tell us that perhaps the destiny of Adriano Olivetti’s region will continue to be linked to the myth of technological innovation. Perhaps this area of Piedmont will be remembered not only for the Cento Vetrine soap opera (produced in one of the many disused industrial sheds at San Giorgio Canavese) and the realisation of an enormous park (desired and disputed) similar to the Millennium project, where technology is used more as a false enticement to sell goods.

For a city now questioning its industrial fate, this will reverse the trend and allow for the rebirth of an Italian capitalism with the capacity to bring together big groups, territorial know-how, technological innovation, design and manufacturing. This, besides being a great communitarian utopia, was the capitalism of Adriano Olivetti.

Aldo Bonomi is director of the Aaster research institute and a consultant to CNEL. His analysis of the social changes in course is contained into two recent books: Il trionfo della moltitudine and Il capitalismo molecolare