Il decree on start-ups, on which Minister Corrado Passera is working, could be an opportunity for the turn towards a new industrial policy that looks to the future, if we want to organically remedy the vicious circle of low innovation – low productivity – low growth, in which we are stuck. Technological start-ups are a new reality for Italy and their presence is still limited. But what is relevant is the sign of change that they express in the way of imagining and doing business. The protagonists of technological start-ups show their substantial genetic and functional diversity compared to traditional entrepreneurs, children of the age of craftsmanship and materials-based manufacturing industry.
The bottom line is that start-ups are small creative realities, all centered on intangible resources (intellectual capital plus human capital), that need time (from 4 to 7 years on average) and intelligent work to express themselves and assume their own identity, overcoming obstacles and risks of various kinds, before being able to demonstrate that they are capable of creating value. In essence, registration in the business register is not sufficient to ratify the effective conclusion of the process of constituting a start-up. All of this implies that the task of policy makers does not end with facilitating and simplifying the creation of start-ups, but must continue over time: start-ups cannot be left on their own, to languish in an embryonic state for too long, with the well-founded risk of seeing their innovative strength debased.
The provision on start-ups could be profitably exploited to activate interests, convergences and energies useful for giving life to a medium-long term economic development strategy, based on innovative entrepreneurship, in line with what other countries are doing, including first and foremost the United States, which has fully understood the shift underway towards entrepreneurial capitalism. It is truly surprising that we should be taught the new relevance of entrepreneurship when Italy is considered the cradle of small businesses in the world. But the fact is that we find it difficult to understand and metabolise the fundamentals of the new phase of the capitalist accumulation process, where it is highly innovative technology-based companies that mature and develop new business and investment opportunities by leveraging the exploitation of new knowledge. On this front in Italy we are very late and the consequences can be seen, with growth languishing and corporate crises increasing.
Even the reforms adopted by the Monti government so far have not entered directly into harmony with the playing field of the real economy. It is necessary to make a change in the microeconomic sense of the action, looking in particular at the new innovative entrepreneurship which has a strong point in knowing how to transfer technology in an entrepreneurial sense, with an ability to interact, on the one hand with research and on the other the market and existing large and small companies, playing a bridge role between these two worlds.
In Italy we are not in Silicon Valley, where the innovation ecosystem is well structured, dynamic and optimally functioning for the incubation, launch and market success of technological spin-offs/start-ups, with its within an evolved and rich network of venture capitalists (among the thirty most active nationwide, no less than seventeen are based in California) who are ready to discover entrepreneurial talents and to bet and invest for their take-off and development, looking at promising opportunities of exits.
Il external context of entrepreneurship – inclusive of a broad set of institutional, economic, social and cultural factors – in Italy it is decidedly disappointing and inadequateor, because beyond the lack of services, infrastructure and financial resources, as well as the presence of bureaucratic obstacles of all kinds, what is missing is a “demand for new innovative companies”, or a private and public market of forward-looking customers ready to experiment and implement innovative proposals offered by start-ups, for which access to the market is a serious handicap. All this also limits the operations of venture capital investors who, due to their lack of propensity and ability to invest capital in so-called "seed funding", are in a useless search for new innovative companies that are already well structured, which however are a rarity.
In Italy we only have a few small islands of advanced technological innovation, dispersed in the university world or in prestigious incubators, with a strong entrepreneurial imprint, where there are objective and subjective conditions for the budding and support of spin-offs and start-ups. In the university field this happens where there are teachers with high research skills in cutting-edge scientific sectors who know how to train researchers and technologists in their laboratories, not only academics, and who know how to prepare them to compete, if equipped with a "practical sensing", on the problems of development and exploitation of research outputs, also collaborating with advanced companies. The incubation role played by the 10-15 best research universities, where the bulk of the approximately 1.200 academic spin-offs present in Italy is concentrated, must be strengthened and qualified with the contribution of skills and means to raise their capabilities, with a concrete support from public and social institutions. In essence, it is necessary to avoid unnecessary waste of resources by aggregating around valuable scientific-technological poles and qualified incubators, existing on the national territory, private and public subjects, capable of activating energies and resources useful for giving life to dynamic and productive market-pull innovation eco-systems, overcoming the experience of unproductive technology transfer infrastructures, supported by huge public funds, started in the 90s with science and technology parks in the South and continued in the early 2000s with the launch of a network of technological districts, where there are few successful cases.
Despite this picture, made up more of shadows than lights, there are many and all important reasons to hope that the provision of Minister Passera, precisely thanks to the originality and topicality of the reference field, could be an opportunity to make a change in the way of imagining industrial things, an objective that today in Italy arises with more urgency than in the recent past.
Faced with the shock wave of the great global crisis and the profound transformations taking place in society, the economy and industry on an international scale, there is a pressing need for a discontinuous industrial policy that looks to the future and therefore to the construction of the new, rather than to the past, and therefore to the conservation of the existing. The crisis is opening up unexpected spaces for the deployment of a strong push towards technological innovation which is the breeding ground for new generations of highly innovative entrepreneurs. This is a community where the number of young people is growing, often in possession of high educational qualifications and a spirit of initiative and individual skills, to whom it is necessary to look at with great sympathy and trust, because they are among the best exponents of what it has been called the “first digital and global generation together”.
Supporting and giving space to new innovative businesses, and through them to change in the entrepreneurial and industrial system, is the way in which all countries, old and new, are looking for the driving force of the XNUMXst century economy. And there are well-founded reasons to go in this direction. Thanks to the great global crisis, with its disruptive effects, an acceleration of the development of new scientific and technological trends is underway (green-technologies, ICT, nanotechnologies, life sciences, new materials, biomedical technologies, micro-mechatronics, etc.) with a substantial increase in public and private investments in R&D which are destined to greatly anticipate the possibilities and times for transforming the research in business, opening the doors to the industrial exploitation of inventions and therefore the race for investments. If Italy wants to avoid the risk of a continuous shrinkage of its production and employment base, it must make every effort to gain its own positioning in the new technological supply chains, intended to give a breakthrough in an innovative and developmental sense to the entire industrial and service system. Only in this way can we seriously aspire to create the pre-conditions for aiming, in the medium-long term, at sustainable growth of the economy and employment.
All the rest are mere palliatives for a crisis of growth and employment which is structural and has its roots in the scarce capacity for innovation. In this drawing, tech start-ups can play their part if, with an organic strategic alliance between public and private, processes and energies are implemented to create habitats suited to their birth and above all to their growth and integration into the economy, at local, regional and national level. All of this can only happen with the active contribution of our most farsighted companies who must learn to understand and exploit the advantages of open innovation by opening up to organic collaborations with research universities and spin-offs/start-ups, as facilitators of the transfer of research outputs. It is along this mission that the Research & Entrepreneurship Foundation was born and is operating.
