Many are calling for a return to industrial policy, even if they don't say which one, or to do what in concrete terms, nor do they estimate costs and financial coverage. One can only guess that they intend to hope that the public hand will intervene to relaunch the productive economy and employment in our country. As if the public purse understands us about the global economy or as if it hasn't already done enough trouble in the past to distort competition in the market. There are also many who invoke public investments, tangible and intangible, to provide work and to lay the foundations for subsequent economic growth. Let's say in the logic of the fifties. Not even these latter make numbers, nor do they concretely indicate which public investments, in which fields, with which corporate instruments given that by now the state shareholdings no longer exist, apart from the abused Cassa DD.PP., on the contrary, every occasion is good to boast front privatizations. In the meantime, Prime Minister Renzi grasps the visceral meaning of these invocations and concocts the Unblock-Italy. We may come back to the merits of this provision when we have analyzed it properly, but in the meantime we can't help but face the question: what else could be done seriously?
There are obviously three possible choices: 1) do nothing, 2) do everything, 3) do little but useful to trigger a self-fertilizing reaction. We don't talk about the first choice, because unfortunately we know it very well. Of the second, let's just say that it should be built to make the Italian production system highly competitive. The international indicators of competitiveness every year churn out rankings in which Italy slips ever lower. For example, according to the overall ranking of the IMD (International Management Development of Lausanne) in 2014 Italy is in 46th place out of a total of 60 countries, whereas in 2013 it was in 44th, in 2012 in 42nd and in 2011 in 40th. Dramatic. Although not among the most intelligent indicators, both because it is based not only on a mix of statistics but also on mood interviews, and because its parameters are weighted and aggregated without a prior analysis of their internal interaction, nevertheless this indicator is the most disaggregated among those in circulation and provides valuable classifications for each structural factor, from the level of taxation to public administration, from infrastructures to services, from scientific ones to energy, from justice to the labor market, etc. Well, the spread, so to speak, on each side should become the guiding star for each path of structural reform. Given Italy's tendency to fall into the abyss of ranking, this is why an effective policy would be equivalent to the second choice, that of doing everything. Naturally, the nodes are intricate, there is a lack of convincing recipes, the few ones are not widely shared because in order to survive every political force aggregates the consent of the potential victims of the reforms, it would take a lot of money that doesn't exist, and so on. Things we hear every day.
For the third choice, that of finding the crux of the matter, we must make a further premise. Some esteemed observers of the business world say that there are many who, despite this taxman, despite this public administration, despite this country, have "turned around, they have multinationalized, they have made innovations, they make profits galore, they are very strong. And, albeit gradually, they increase in number. Taken together they still make a subcritical mass, in the statistics they still don't weigh enough, but they are there and they multiply. In other words, the best Italian companies pass the selection of the species imposed by an evil state and thus monsters of competitive prowess are born. By definition, it would be good for the State to ignore them, otherwise it would do damage, it would be better not to invent any tailor-made industrial policy on them. It would be better for the state to think only of the second option, that of doing everything for systemic competitiveness.
A virtuous thing, however, in my opinion, the State should still begin to do, without causing damage. How to find the key to the problem. It should enable smooth technology transfer (TT). I'll explain. I am annoyed by those who say «but small businesses don't do research». It's a bit like, on the symmetrical and opposite front, criticizing research centers that don't produce and don't sell. But what speeches? I say, each his own job, research centers do research and small businesses - which are over 90 percent of the Italian system, which do not have scientific techno-structures and can't grow overnight - produce, sell and that's it . If anything, the problem is another, it is that small businesses don't even have the culture to know what technological knowledge suitable for each of them exists around them and they wouldn't be able to dialogue with researchers, nor these with them. The TT is the transfer of ideas, know-how, technologies from a public organization dedicated to research (public laboratory, university, non-profit research organization) to another dedicated to the production of goods and services and can take place through contracts collaboration between University and business; consultancy; patent licensing; publications; spin-off creation; mobility of researchers, etc. The first example were the experimental stations created in 1885. Over the decades, other examples have been the IMI applied research fund in 1968, an article of law 46 in 1982, the science and technology parks and the BICs in the XNUMXs, the technology transfer office and university spin-offs since the end of the XNUMXs. All these experiments have worked quite well, but with high management costs, unknown efficacy and insufficient proof of facts. In Germany there are excellent TT structures. Nobody thinks about this spread here.
A different attempt was made in 2003 by the Ministry of Economic Development with a pilot program of TT, called Riditt (Network for the diffusion of innovation and technology transfer to companies) and a budget of just 5,16 million euros. The management was entrusted to the Ipi, Institute for Industrial Promotion, an agency of the Ministry itself. The aim was to co-finance projects intended explicitly and exclusively for the transfer of technologies already developed and available, at Universities and research centres, with the constraint that at least one entrepreneurial association take part in the project, and that the themes fall into four areas technologies (automation and sensors, advanced materials, biotechnologies, chemical-separative technologies). The participation rate was much higher than expected. 42 project proposals arrived, for a total value of over €40 million, and the aggregation of 203 different organizations among them, including 50 universities, 24 research centres, 66 business associations, 63 TT centres. The shower of answers could certainly not be explained with the financial resources granted, a penny, but rather with the thirst for technological knowledge felt by the world of the productive economy. To be successful, however, such policies require upstream a knowledge framework of the TT system (operators, technologies and interaction mechanisms) and, downstream, metrics and systems for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of their impact. And instead today the upstream knowledge framework is still somewhat limited and the monitoring and evaluation systems are practiced only sporadically. In the meantime, the IPI has been suppressed and the staff has been absorbed by the Ministry.
I imagine that the reader will think: here is the usual mountain that gives birth to a mouse. And so we prefer to continue following the statistical bulletins on household confidence, industrial production and exports, as if the problems were cyclical and not structural. If the Renzi government had sufficient culture and sensitivity, it would place the TT at the center of its action. This would be the real Italy unblocker, not the thousand yards of concrete. Minister Federica Guidi certainly has this sensitivity. Why doesn't it activate?
