In the vocabulary of industrial innovation, “automation” is one of those words that risks losing its meaning through overuse. Everyone mentions it, but few see it genuinely applied in companies’ day-to-day processes. Even fewer can explain it in a way that is understandable without reducing it to repetitive formulas and stereotypical narratives.
Today, many businesses find themselves facing an increasingly evident contradiction: while technology evolves rapidly, the language used to communicate it often remains stuck in a distant, technical, and self-referential narrative. Innovation is described as something immediate, linear, and radical. Yet in industrial reality, change almost always takes a different form, quieter, more gradual, and more complex.
And it is precisely here that industrial communication is beginning to change its role.
Margherita Ferragatta, CEO of IDT Solution, a Turin-based company founded in 2016, operates within this gap between language and reality. Her approach to industrial innovation does not begin with the idea of transforming systems, but with a simpler and less frequently discussed observation: systems already exist, and they can rarely be rebuilt from scratch. Innovation becomes a matter of managing complexity rather than overcoming the past.
And this also changes the way companies need to learn how to tell their own stories.
For years, the industrial sector communicated almost exclusively through performance metrics, numbers, and technology. Today, however, the issue is no longer simply demonstrating what a system can do, but explaining how it integrates into real production processes, people, adaptation timelines, and cultural transformations.
Because innovative companies often do not have a technical problem. They have a translation problem.
Industrial automation: innovating without starting over
In business journalism, industrial technology is often presented through a particular narrative framework: speed, reduction, and continuous change. This style of communication tends to portray innovation as something that must necessarily appear rapid, radical, and constantly visible.
But the more the narrative accelerates, the greater the risk of distancing itself from the actual work being done.
In practice, industrial innovation has far less to do with speed and much more to do with the ability to enter existing systems without compromising them. This also changes the value we assign to technology itself: what succeeds is not what is newest, but what can integrate without disrupting what already works.
The challenge is not developing advanced systems, but making them understandable to outsiders without oversimplifying them. If everything is communicated as fast, intuitive, and immediately applicable, the risk is making invisible the very work that truly enables innovation to function. Technical expertise, system adaptation, gradual integration, and complexity management disappear from the corporate narrative, replaced by communication focused primarily on the final outcome.
Yet industrial branding is now undergoing profound change.
Communication no longer serves merely to “present” a company. It is becoming part of productive value itself. It helps build trust, attract talent, explain complex processes, and make visible innovation that often operates behind the scenes. This approach connects directly to Goal 9 of the 2030 Agenda, but only when removed from the rhetoric of permanent innovation. Sustainable industry is not the one that changes everything faster than everyone else, but the one that can withstand change without collapsing under the weight of its own narrative.
The issue of access to technology also fits within this transformation. Open-source technologies, for example, are reshaping the balance between established companies and smaller organizations by reducing certain economic barriers and making tools more accessible, tools that until just a few years ago were reserved for much larger contexts.
How innovation communication changes the value of work
Yet while discussions focus on technology and systems, one element that deeply influences how these processes are perceived is almost always left out of the picture: communication.
The tendency is to assume that innovation is immediate, linear, and almost neutral. But in the daily work of those implementing it, that linearity does not exist. Ferragatta operates precisely within this ongoing tension between what is technically possible and what is realistically integrable.
Here, communication has a greater impact than it might seem. It ceases to be a simple corporate narrative and becomes part of productive value itself. The way a technology is described ultimately changes how expertise, technical work, and even the time required to build meaningful change are perceived.
And perhaps this is the most interesting contradiction of today’s industrial landscape: innovation is now judged partly by how communicable it is. Yet the most profound changes are often the least spectacular.
For this reason, the point is not to tell the story of perfect innovation, but of innovation that works precisely because it accepts its own complexity.
Access to technology and invisible inequalities
The discussion therefore expands without changing direction: access to technology.
Who can truly afford to innovate? And who remains on the margins because they lack the necessary tools?
Portraying innovation as universally accessible risks concealing the real differences between those who possess the tools, skills, and investment capacity and those who are still trying to create the conditions necessary to innovate.
Open-source technologies enter precisely into this divide. They do not eliminate structural differences between companies, but they do lower certain barriers to entry. They make it possible to adopt technologies that, in other contexts, would remain accessible only to highly structured organizations.
This aspect relates directly to Goal 10 of the 2030 Agenda, where reducing inequalities is no longer solely a social issue but also extends to technological and productive dimensions. Increasingly, today’s divide is defined by access to tools.
The innovation that works Is not always the most visible
Ultimately, when considering Ferragatta’s interpretation of innovation, the structure of industrial systems, and the role of communication, there are no separate layers.
There is a single process that moves through successive adaptations: technologies entering existing systems, systems evolving without interruption, and narratives continually trying to simplify something that is not simple.
Yet the most profound changes are often the least spectacular—not those that disrupt everything, but those that integrate without erasing what already exists.
The most profound changes are often the least spectacular.
The point, then, is not to tell the story of perfect innovation, but of innovation that works precisely because it embraces its own complexity.Through the Scoperte project, Scoprinetwork explores companies and manufacturing organizations that are reshaping the relationship between industry, innovation, and communication, moving beyond the oversimplified narratives through which change is often portrayed. If you want to discover how and why innovation in industry does not always mean starting from scratch, read Margherita Ferragatta‘s interview, where industrial automation and technological transformation intersect beyond the usual innovation clichés.
