In the last twenty years the economies of the most important industrialized countries experienced several innovation processes: the increasing role of knowledge embodied in material and immaterial capital, the tightening between organizational change and technological improvement embodied in fixed capital, the diffusion at both local and global context of organizational innovations in labour and production activities.
Our country as a whole, but also its historically virtuous regional areas, faces increasing difficulties in this new scenario. The economic and social system shows in recent years some rigidities in adapting its model, which proved in different conditions to have reached good performance in the previous decades, and to being able to keep competitive not only with respect to emerging economies (mainly Asian and western European countries) with high rate of economic growth, but also with respect to mature economies of our European partners.
The main indicator of our difficulties of adaptation of the national and regional models is the dynamic of (labour and total factor) productivity. Different factors seem responsible for this weak performance: rigidities in labour markets and specifically in labour contracts, diseconomies caused by inefficient infrastructures, weakness in the commitments for new investment, education and training policies, for technological innovation and research activities, slow diffusion of new organization practices in production and work processes, presence of rent seeking position in strategic sectors, lack of economic incentives to public and private actors for acting as a system.
Innovation is clearly the key factor to competitiveness for an industrial system strongly rooted in manufacturing sectors, characterized by the prevalence of small- and medium sized firms, operating in the economic and normative context of industrialized European countries, with high cost level. At the same time, the system is composed of different territorial sub-systems with different degree of internal socio-economic cohesion.
In this short paper, we discuss some of the central aspects responsible for the low/high dynamic of productivity, and this is carried out with reference of empirical evidences for a regional system, the Emilia-Romagna one, which is considered one the most virtuous ones at the national and European level.