Abstract
According to a consistent literature the creation of new products can be explain, to large extent, as a process of knowledge recombination. (Schumpeter 1934, Van de Ven 1986, Amabile, 1988, Hargadon and Bechky 2006). Recent studies on the activity of design firms (Hargadon and Sutton 1997, Stigliani and Ravasi 2012) show that new product development is strongly influenced by intertwined interaction of organizational routines and artifacts which organizations use to sustain the generation of novel knowledge. On this regard, in this paper, we discuss the role of physical artifacts in the process of new product design and development. The physical, tangible artifacts that we analyse are tools that organizations use in the regular work activity, as well as product components and collections of final products.