Mass consumption was made possible, among other things, by the introduction of customized, automatic packaging machines – in charge of manufacturing various kinds of packages that have fundamental transport, commercial, and hygienic functions for the trade of a wide range of consumer goods. In the second half of the 20th century Italy became the second world-producer of this machinery after Germany, and the local compartment established in Bologna became the main manufacturing centre in the world. The classic economic literature described the Bolognese packaging sector as a sort of industrial district (e.g. Capecchi, 1997), characterized by the development of a pool of technical knowledge shared among the local technicians. Yet, limited in-depth attention has been devoted until now to the establishment and evolution of the different corporate technical communities present within the district, and to their peculiarities. The present paper is a first attempt to probe into one of the main local corporate communities, analysing its evolutionary pathway in terms of concrete learning processes, pool of knowledge, skills & tools, work organization, external collaborations, and innovation practices. The company singled out is G.D S.p.A., one of the three world-leaders in the production of tobacco packaging machinery. The focus is on G.D’s technical design office considered in the period 1960-1998 and on its invention and innovation work on one of the company’s most successful products (the G.D cigarette packer). The study relies both on primary corporate documents and personal communications of G.D designers. First of all, it results that four generations of designers contributed to and participated in a shared pool of knowledge & skills that over the years emerged as a distinctive endowment of the G.D’s technical design office. Secondly, the paper highlights that in the 1980s and the 1990s the innovation practices of the technical design office depended especially on the improvement of its fundamental problem-solving capabilities – which led to the redefinition of the internal work organization and of the identity of this technical community. This case study suggests a more heterogeneous picture of the technical personnel working within the Bolognese packaging district, claiming for a more in-depth analysis of the various local technical communities and of their interactions in order to understand the innovation capabilities of this compartment.