The emergence of business history
The history of business is opening up an important space in the field of Italian historical studies.
However, there is still an enormous difference with the Anglo-Saxon school in which business history has such an ancient and deeply rooted tradition as to be a field of study almost in its own right, a field that embraces and influences various neighboring disciplines.
It would be enough to think of the echo that stirred the latest book by the historian Jill Lepore, an esteemed Harvard scholar who criticized the conclusions of one of the most influential and revered historians and theorists of innovative enterprise of our time, the late Clayton Christensen.
Lepore's latest work, IF THEN: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is an accurate study dedicated to the history of a company so innovative as to be a forerunner of Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Simulmatics, founded in 1959, in fact set out to process and analyze data collected in various fields such as the economy, psychology, politics and the military. The work of the Simulmatics technologists was aimed at predicting the behavior of consumers and citizens. A sort of benign Cambridge Analytica. Note that we are in the sixties of the last century!
Lepore's book received many accolades and was shortlisted as a final six for the 2020 FT/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
In Italy
It is a pity that Italian academics have not dedicated similar attention to the history of our country's companies which have particular characteristics. Unfortunately, a certain hegemonic stream of historical studies has reduced business history to a lesser God.
There are notable exceptions such as Valerio Castronovo for large companies, Giacomo Becattini for industrial districts, Giulio Sapelli who, in unsuspecting times, dedicated many resources to the history of the company understood as an organic historical form, in the wake of his direct experience in Olivetti and the theories of German sociologists of the late nineteenth-early twentieth century.
Out of these studies, specialism, micro-history and sporadic case studies have prevailed. In the academic field, the history of the company as a historical form has remained rather silent.
Companies had to write their own stories often commissioned from those who did not have all the tools to produce a work of historical value. Often celebrated or chronicled works came out of it, but no less interesting for the story they gave us, otherwise lost.
Engineering
For this reason, a new release in bookstores should be welcomed with great interest: 40 years of Engineering. The story of an Italian company and the people who built it, by Nicola Melideo (Guerini Next with goWare for the digital edition).
Engineering is one of the companies that have written, in the wake of Olivetti, an important page of the Italian ITC. It is right at the origins of the IT industry in our country, having started operating just when this sector, so strategic, was giving its first stirrings.
We publish below an excerpt from the book, the preface by Paolo Pagliaro.
The iIntroduction by Paolo Pagliaro
Engineering today
In 2020 the largest company in the IT sector, Engineering — Ingegneria Informatica SpA, founded by Michele Cinaglia, and now counting 12.000 employees and about 3.000 collaborators, celebrates its first forty years. This chronicle tells the story of these years, strongly characterized by a "nationally led" company government, and introduces the season of a new company management, the one that will result from the meeting of a first-rate historical management with the strategic orientations of investment funds, the company's new owners.
The pages written by Nicola Melideo, witness and participant in the events narrated and now scrupulous and fair-minded reporter, tell us about this story, in many respects exemplary. There are many subjects whose stories are intertwined in the story. The first is the company, which has made a considerable contribution to the development of the country. Beyond the numbers (1,2 billion in turnover, 65 offices in Italy, Belgium, Germany, Norway, the Republic of Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil and the USA, 420 researchers and data scientists, a multidisciplinary training school which in the last year has provided over 21.000 training days) affects the quality and usefulness of the projects developed.
Most of them have a public impact, whether it's supporting active labor policies, making remote medicine possible, securing energy infrastructure or improving waste management.
Intervention in the Public Administration
After having contributed to innovating the banking system, Engineering has been a decisive partner in making the Public Administration more modern.
He has made available his ability to develop information systems and his human capital for a post-modern business, where reliability has to do not with manufactured goods but with the solidity of intangible assets such as the rationality of processes, the efficiency, privacy, security.
The book recalls that among the primates that Engineering can boast there is also that of Italian IT company with the highest number of projects financed by the European Commission.
The country system
The reader of the following pages may happen, as happened to the drafter of this preface, to grasp the presence of a second protagonist, who is actually a great absentee and who, by convention, we call "country system".
In fact, in the narration of the events concerning Engineering, there are no political initiatives aimed at affirming the strategic nature of information technology for the country, and at aggregating at an Italian level, around the leading company, a pole of skills and production capacities comparable with the homologous European realities, for example in Germany, France, Spain.
However, you will never hear the protagonists of this extraordinary entrepreneurial adventure complaining because theirs was a solo climb. They are, if anything, proud of it. And after all, the quality of the legacy that the founders of the company place in the hands of the new shareholders is such that they will perhaps not be able to help but continue the work started forty years ago, realizing, in the future more or less -next, a positive and transparent collaboration within and for the benefit of the "Country System".
Politics
On the other hand, if we talk about the role of politics here, it is because politics, good politics, was by no means extraneous, as we will read, to the birth and development first of Cerved and then of the spin-off Engineering.
Other times? It is true that now the State almost always takes care of companies when they are run down or on sale; and which rarely plays in advance by supporting its strengthening and expansion. But there are signs that authorize cautious hopes for the future of national information technology and a scenario in which Engineering will be able to continue to grow.
The role of the state in the economy
In the rest of the world, a system is "made". Let's take the United States and the sector in which Engineering operates. There, research projects that promise to transform themselves into the technological and therefore economic innovation of the future are financed by the State. Economist Mariana Mazzuccato has calculated that 75% of the new wealth produced in the United States since 1945 derives from goods and services that have incorporated the new knowledge created in publicly funded laboratories.
Through numerous government agencies, the United States continues to support innovation with a variety of tools. There are the direct funding through the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel; the very rich public contracts, such as those that feed Palantir's activity in artificial intelligence; the exceptionally favorable regulatory conditions to promote the development of over the top and technology companies, with generous tax breaks.
There is the State Department which promotes and defends platforms in jurisdictions that consider many of the advantages they enjoy to be illegitimate. The innovating State does not deem the choice of becoming a shareholder in strategic companies illiberal: it deems it necessary. It happens not only in America, but also in more advanced European countries such as Germany or in emerging ones such as South Korea.
The protagonists of the story
Reading the report presented here allows you to get to know the protagonists of this story, the people who made the Engineering company great. Their names are engraved in the gold register of Italian information technology and all of them can be found in the pages of Melideo.
There is Mario Volpato, professor of applied mathematics, president of the Padua Chamber of Commerce and founder of Cerved in 1974, a brilliant man, a visionary, among the first to guess that the season of big data would soon begin.
There is Arrigo Abati, another pioneer, managing director of Engineering after having participated in the birth and affirmation of Cerved.
There is Sergio De Vio, a refined intellectual and long-time president of the company; and there is Paolo Pandozy, the manager under whose direction Engineering has seen its size grow and value and profits explode.
There are - finally and above all - Rosario Amodeo and Michele Cinaglia, the two entrepreneurs who, after having circumnavigated the world and braved storms of all kinds together, could not agree on the port of call and said goodbye forever.
Ideas on the future of Engineering
Two different ideas on the future of Engineering have proved irreconcilable. That of a "public company" owned by the main Italian banking group or by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a solution that Cinaglia was working on, could not be reconciled with the advent of the family dynasty envisioned by Amodeo. The failure to reconcile the two visions of the desirable future for Engineering has prevented both from being realised.
The two partners undoubtedly emerged enriched from this affair. Get rich with honour is the title of a treatise written in 1458 by a humanist merchant, the Dalmatian Benedetto Cotrugli, who argued that getting rich honestly means enriching society and that, if it is true that accounts must be kept in order, it is equally true that this it is not enough: intellectual, professional, moral and human skills are needed without which what is achieved is not a real enterprise.
The power of ingenuity
The last time Michele Cinaglia attended the kick-off of Engineering was on March 11, 2019, at the Parco della Musica in Rome. He spoke for a few minutes and not about company balance sheets, new markets or innovative products but to the two thousand executives and managers who listened to him in religious silence he spoke of the amazement felt the day before in front of the bronze doors of San Giovanni in Laterano, in Rome, coming from Curia Iulia, the ancient Roman Senate. He lingered on the strength, on the ingenuity, on the enchantment that the genius of the past gives us. When Cinaglia was silent there was a timid applause, almost circumstantial, but which then gradually became more and more convinced and warmer, as if little by little everyone had finally understood.
Taken from: 40 years of Engineering. The story of an Italian company and the people who built it, by Nicola Melideo (ed. Guerini Next with goWare for the digital edition), pp. 11-14.
