This book provides a comprehensive framework for the analysis of innovative organizational social settings by assembling three essays examining the intersection between intellectual capital, management control systems and the rhetoric of IT artefacts in enabling innovation.
Based on the case of development of a technological device in Autostrade (an international leader as service provider and system integrator in the sector of infrastructures and networks for motorway mobility), the study explores the organizational and social context that enables the Telepass innovation, the social role and social effects of innovation and the main managerial accounting tools, which lead these effects by activating chains of translations.
This book challenges the traditional paradigm that views accounting and control as detrimental to innovation and suggests that management control systems can be used and mobilised towards innovation purposes. It is not primarily concerned with the question of the boundaries of controls, as previous studies did, rather it is more concerned on their interaction with the development of the innovation.
This book addresses these issues and suggests that managerial accounting tools, as mediating instruments between social arenas and markets, offer not only the knowledge base architecture for developing innovation but they change and adapt over time and become part of the innovation itself.

Silvana Revellino is Research Associate at the Department of Operation Management at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. Before joining CBS in 2009, she obtained her PhD in Economics and Management of Technology at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Her research focuses on the role and effect of management control technologies in innovative organizational social settings. She is interested in translations and interpretations made of accounting inscriptions. Her current areas of research include Innovation Management, Accounting and Management Control, Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Management. Address for correspondence: Copenhagen Business School, Department of Operations Management, Solbjerg Plads 3, DK 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark.