Creation of Fashion Trends and Role of the Bureau de Style for Textile Innovation

The aim of this paper is to examine the bureaux de style as producers of fashion trends and their interactions with textile firms in order to analyze their contribution in terms of knowledge and of competence to textile innovation processes. The business relationships for innovation has considerable current importance in the textile sector. Although this industry is considered mature, product innovation, based on the generation and exploitation of fashion trends, represents a fundamental strategic option to face the increasingly competitive pressure. From a theoretical point of view, the achievement of our research goals has led us to analyze the scientific paradigms of knowledge generation and of cognitive networks as conceptual frameworks. As to knowledge generation we focus on constructivism, which considers the creation of knowledge as a generative act (Weick, 1995; Starbuck and Milliken 1988; Westley 1990; Louis, 1980; Griffith 1999; Drazin et al. 1999). In other words knowledge is not just a revelation of an objectively given situation; its generation means creating a reality and actively influencing the surrounding circumstances, which it contributes to shaping (Von Glasersfeld, 1981). According to this approach the process of knowledge generation can be subdivided into the three specific stages: a) activation of the environment; b) selection of environment on the basis of the search for causal linkages; and c) retention of the constructed environment. Portions of potential knowledge are identified in the environment that can take form and be built as a subjective act. The constructivist approach is opposed to the cognitive approach , which considers knowledge as a representation of a world, outside the subject; this is because the object of thought processes is consists of symbols and situations which are structured by encoding and elaborating information. In connection with the cognitive network (Schwenk, 1988; Lektorskii, 2010), we introduce the concept of relations as way of sharing and exploiting knowledge to generate product innovation. In particular relations among firms can favor the exchange and sharing of cognitive resources, producing a co-evolution of their own learning processes and product innovations. Studies in management literature analyze the cognitive contribution to innovation deriving from subjects (customers, distributors, suppliers) belonging to the same inter-organizational network (Cooper and Kleinschmidt 1987; Von Hippel, 1988, 2011; Jones and Ritz 1991; Rangan, Melvyn and Mayer 1992; Clark and Fujimoto 1991; Leonard-Barton, 1995). Other studies highlight how the development of innovation also implies an analysis of the sources of knowledge internal to the firm. A firm in order to produce innovation, has to assimilate the external stock of knowledge and combine it with its competence, thereby producing new knowledge (Mahajan and Wind, 1992; Workman, 1993; Griffin and Hauser, 1994; Pisano, 1994; Bruce and Morris, 1995; Davies-Cooper and Jones, 1995; Williams and Smith, 1990; Axelsson and Håkansson, 1990). In this perspective, the process of new product development is encouraged by the integration of knowledge between an inter-enterprise network and an intra-enterprise network, which can considered in the various functions of the firm (marketing, research and development, production, purchasing). Resting on these theoretical frameworks, our empirical analysis focuses on the processes of knowledge generation produced by the bureaux de style. In particular we examine a) how the bureaux de style produce knowledge to generate fashion trends; b) the interactions between bureaux de style and textile firms in the sharing and production of fashion trends; and c) the contribution of these interactions to textile product innovation. In a relational perspective the bureaux de style constitute part of the cognitive network for innovation in textile firms; they produce creative knowledge that can influence the realization of seasonal collections. Our study is both exploratory and original: in the management literature in fact, specific studies on the bureaux de style and their role in the fashion sector have not yet been carried out. Our work is based not only on the study of the literature and an analysis of the results of research on this topic, but also on primary sources consisting of information gathered through interviews with four important bureaux de style in France and Italy, which, in the opinion of Italian textile manufacturers’ associations, are considered to play a major role in trend generation.