Corporate culture, predominance of the Veneto region and competitiveness within the EU
Four cities, constituting together the “corporate culture capital” of 2022. Four regions, amongst the most productive and competitive in Italy and – why not? – in Europe, to create what is termed an area vasta (wide area), rich in manufacturing and services, able to narrate industrial stories and, while looking to the future, tell about the traits that particularly distinguish entrepreneurship: creativity, innovation, competitiveness, growth. The four cities to have won this year’s competition as the representatives of corporate culture, following an initiative launched a few years ago by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria, are Padua, Treviso, Venice and Rovigo (previous capitals included Genoa and Alba). The opening ceremony took place on 5 April, in a very crowded Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, and we’re now looking forward to 80 events, held over the next months, featuring entrepreneurs, heads of institutions, political and social actors, cultural figures, discussing how to keep alive and enhance – even in such difficult times, rife with crises and geopolitical tensions – the distinctive Italian attitude of “do, do well and do good”.
Indeed, what do we mean when we talk of “corporate culture”? We mean an aspect of our more general culture that can combine, in new ways, humanities subjects and scientific knowledge, projects and products, industry and services, people’s passions and sophisticated technologies, while simultaneously looking back to ancient manufacturing skills and forward towards an economically sustainable future. We mean a “polytechnic culture”, in short, and the story of how “since the Middle Ages, Italian people have been accustomed to make, under the shade of a bell tower, beautiful objects cherished by the world” – to quote, once more, the strikingly brilliant description by Carlo Maria Cipolla, a great economic historian.
Culture, it was proclaimed from the stage of the Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, obviously comprises literature, music, painting and sculpture, cinema and photography – all the various representational art forms (which should generate fertile relationships with the world of entrepreneurship and work, too). Yet, culture is also science, mathematics, physics, an industrial patent and a chemical formula that revolutionises industry and consumption, as well as the quality of life (such as the one for the polymerisation of propylene, which saw Giulio Natta being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963). Culture is an employment contract that defines the power and work relations between the individuals that keep a company alive. Culture is both a balance sheet and a budget. Culture entails the innovative digital languages employed by marketing, advertisement and media communication. Culture encompasses graphic design, which, by blending beauty and functionality has been key to the industrial development and international competitiveness of Italian industry from the 1950s up to now – as eminently illustrated by the museums and archives of Museimpresa (the Italian association of business archives and corporate museums) over the past 20 years.
And culture, of course, also includes the industrial architecture that distinguishes the Olivetti factories in Ivrea and Pozzuoli and the Pirelli’s worksites, from the skyscraper designed by architect Gio Ponti to the redevelopment of the Bicocca neighbourhood by architect Vittorio Gregotti (from the industrial tyre and cable manufacturing plant to the “beautiful factory” planned by architect Renzo Piano for the Industrial Hub in Settimo Torinese – bright, transparent, safe and sustainable, erected among 400 cherry trees. A transformational culture that can be summarised as “industrial humanism” – nowadays updated to “digital humanism” – and in the various attempts to recapture the 20th-century antinomies between Kultur and Zivilization, “high culture” and day-to-day technologies and know-how.
Factories or, even better, the modern digital factories, are the perfect examples of this. Indeed, in our current era, marked by the knowledge economy and artificial intelligence, working to find new intellectual concepts to express the confluence of this diverse array of expertise and skills has become crucial. To be able to face the complexities that are making our times controversial and restless, we need to take into consideration the multidisciplinary relationships between engineering and philosophy, mathematics and sociology, economics and neurosciences, law and mechatronics.
And to better understand the significance of “polytechnic relationships”, we simply need to refer back to Primo Levi’s The periodic table: “Mendeleev’s periodic table, which we industriously learned to unravel, was a poem, the highest and most solemn of all the poems we assimilated in high school.” Levi was an industrial chemist and, at the same time, an extraordinary poet, a major literary figure of the 20th century.
These are precisely the dimensions of corporate culture that can become corporate drivers for growth in this new competitive context, made more difficult and contentious by the dramatic events we are experiencing, from the consequences of climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recession, as well as the recent grievous evolutions of the war in Ukraine and the crisis affecting the traditional mechanisms of power and exchange.
Value chains are being rebuilt, within a new “selective re-globalisation”. New competitive relationships are being defined, while phenomena of backshoring – or reshoring – gradually intensify, with industrial production structures coming back to their countries of origin, and Europe turning into a revamped manufacturing platform. And the EU’s realisation about the need of establishing its own strategic autonomy (so as not to be crushed by superpowers’ conflicts) demands a number of political choices on security, energy and technology, which urge us not only towards a paradigm shift in political relations and economic and social development, but also towards new and better choices in relation to social and industrial policies.
It’s exactly this critical reinterpretation of the range of ideas that, in recent years, have guided globalisation, the digital economy and the creation of updated knowledge, production and consumption maps, that has made Italian corporate culture (memory and innovation, design and environmental and social sustainability, care for people and flexible, sophisticated artificial intelligence) extraordinarily valuable for the development of the circular and civil economy, and the relaunch of Italy in the European competitive contest.
Our companies – as stated in Venice when talking about the “new industrial triangle” formed by the Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia regions – do have some essential resources at their core, such as a dynamic social capital’s innovative power and a cultural depth moulded by industrial humanism, the distinctive trait of Italian economic history, which will continue to shape our future.
Four cities, constituting together the “corporate culture capital” of 2022. Four regions, amongst the most productive and competitive in Italy and – why not? – in Europe, to create what is termed an area vasta (wide area), rich in manufacturing and services, able to narrate industrial stories and, while looking to the future, tell about the traits that particularly distinguish entrepreneurship: creativity, innovation, competitiveness, growth. The four cities to have won this year’s competition as the representatives of corporate culture, following an initiative launched a few years ago by territorial entrepreneurial institution Confindustria, are Padua, Treviso, Venice and Rovigo (previous capitals included Genoa and Alba). The opening ceremony took place on 5 April, in a very crowded Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, and we’re now looking forward to 80 events, held over the next months, featuring entrepreneurs, heads of institutions, political and social actors, cultural figures, discussing how to keep alive and enhance – even in such difficult times, rife with crises and geopolitical tensions – the distinctive Italian attitude of “do, do well and do good”.
Indeed, what do we mean when we talk of “corporate culture”? We mean an aspect of our more general culture that can combine, in new ways, humanities subjects and scientific knowledge, projects and products, industry and services, people’s passions and sophisticated technologies, while simultaneously looking back to ancient manufacturing skills and forward towards an economically sustainable future. We mean a “polytechnic culture”, in short, and the story of how “since the Middle Ages, Italian people have been accustomed to make, under the shade of a bell tower, beautiful objects cherished by the world” – to quote, once more, the strikingly brilliant description by Carlo Maria Cipolla, a great economic historian.
Culture, it was proclaimed from the stage of the Teatro Goldoni theatre in Venice, obviously comprises literature, music, painting and sculpture, cinema and photography – all the various representational art forms (which should generate fertile relationships with the world of entrepreneurship and work, too). Yet, culture is also science, mathematics, physics, an industrial patent and a chemical formula that revolutionises industry and consumption, as well as the quality of life (such as the one for the polymerisation of propylene, which saw Giulio Natta being awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963). Culture is an employment contract that defines the power and work relations between the individuals that keep a company alive. Culture is both a balance sheet and a budget. Culture entails the innovative digital languages employed by marketing, advertisement and media communication. Culture encompasses graphic design, which, by blending beauty and functionality has been key to the industrial development and international competitiveness of Italian industry from the 1950s up to now – as eminently illustrated by the museums and archives of Museimpresa (the Italian association of business archives and corporate museums) over the past 20 years.
And culture, of course, also includes the industrial architecture that distinguishes the Olivetti factories in Ivrea and Pozzuoli and the Pirelli’s worksites, from the skyscraper designed by architect Gio Ponti to the redevelopment of the Bicocca neighbourhood by architect Vittorio Gregotti (from the industrial tyre and cable manufacturing plant to the “beautiful factory” planned by architect Renzo Piano for the Industrial Hub in Settimo Torinese – bright, transparent, safe and sustainable, erected among 400 cherry trees. A transformational culture that can be summarised as “industrial humanism” – nowadays updated to “digital humanism” – and in the various attempts to recapture the 20th-century antinomies between Kultur and Zivilization, “high culture” and day-to-day technologies and know-how.
Factories or, even better, the modern digital factories, are the perfect examples of this. Indeed, in our current era, marked by the knowledge economy and artificial intelligence, working to find new intellectual concepts to express the confluence of this diverse array of expertise and skills has become crucial. To be able to face the complexities that are making our times controversial and restless, we need to take into consideration the multidisciplinary relationships between engineering and philosophy, mathematics and sociology, economics and neurosciences, law and mechatronics.
And to better understand the significance of “polytechnic relationships”, we simply need to refer back to Primo Levi’s The periodic table: “Mendeleev’s periodic table, which we industriously learned to unravel, was a poem, the highest and most solemn of all the poems we assimilated in high school.” Levi was an industrial chemist and, at the same time, an extraordinary poet, a major literary figure of the 20th century.
These are precisely the dimensions of corporate culture that can become corporate drivers for growth in this new competitive context, made more difficult and contentious by the dramatic events we are experiencing, from the consequences of climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic and the recession, as well as the recent grievous evolutions of the war in Ukraine and the crisis affecting the traditional mechanisms of power and exchange.
Value chains are being rebuilt, within a new “selective re-globalisation”. New competitive relationships are being defined, while phenomena of backshoring – or reshoring – gradually intensify, with industrial production structures coming back to their countries of origin, and Europe turning into a revamped manufacturing platform. And the EU’s realisation about the need of establishing its own strategic autonomy (so as not to be crushed by superpowers’ conflicts) demands a number of political choices on security, energy and technology, which urge us not only towards a paradigm shift in political relations and economic and social development, but also towards new and better choices in relation to social and industrial policies.
It’s exactly this critical reinterpretation of the range of ideas that, in recent years, have guided globalisation, the digital economy and the creation of updated knowledge, production and consumption maps, that has made Italian corporate culture (memory and innovation, design and environmental and social sustainability, care for people and flexible, sophisticated artificial intelligence) extraordinarily valuable for the development of the circular and civil economy, and the relaunch of Italy in the European competitive contest.
Our companies – as stated in Venice when talking about the “new industrial triangle” formed by the Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia regions – do have some essential resources at their core, such as a dynamic social capital’s innovative power and a cultural depth moulded by industrial humanism, the distinctive trait of Italian economic history, which will continue to shape our future.