Le sfide competitive dei sistemi maturi nel mercato globale. Innovazione e cambiamento istituzionale nel modello emiliano.

Abstract

The competition challenge of the mature systems in the global market. Innovation and institutional change in the Emilian model. Competitiveness is defined as capability to satisfy a potential demand, or ability to produce by a technology. For this reason, issues related to the territorial organization of production and to the industry life cycle are overlapped. In fact, the possibilities to use a technology strictly depend on the ways of production organization and, when production is a local matter, also the technology becomes local. Localized systems of production are just defined by this overlapping and, once a dominant technological paradigm is arisen, they turn in mature ones, i.e. they have to cope with a competition paradox. The only solution is an increase in the division of labour getting the territory to take a new technological path and start a new development process. This process goes through a system shake-out expanding the set of productive relations in the direction of an institutional division of labour, because maturity represents the depletion of a «work to be done» that is also the reaching of the full divisibility of labour. Hence, production processes have to be opened to new players that must be able to use the same local technology. These ones are the institutions that by «functional spin-offs» are entitled to participate to the production. Thus, the territory becomes a «territorial platform of production»