Abstract

If during the 1980s and the 1990s North-Eastern Italy represented a peculiar path to the competitiveness on international markets, in more recent times the ability of this model to face suitably the challenges posed by globalization and the recession has been questioned. In this article, we argue that this crisis entailed a deep transformation in the socio-economic structure of Nort-Eastern Italy, which we read along five dimensions that characterized also the previous model: the main specialization, the characteristics of the proprietorship, the new firm formation, the character of innovation capabilities and the organization in industrial districts. In particular, our analysis suggests a shift from manufacturing to service specializations, the weakening of the importance of familiar resources to the advantage of more complex organizational structures, the move from a model characterized by the formation of diffused yet replicative new ventures to one with less yet innovative ones, the shift from incremental innovations developed through learning-by-doing processes to more radical ones based on an intense R&D effort, and, finally, the transition from the industrial districts paradigm to the global value chains one.