Pier Angelo Toninelli

Opening the black box of entrepreneurship: The Italian case in a historical perspective

The main objective of this paper is to shed light on the Italian entrepreneurship between the beginning of the second industrial revolution and the end of the twentieth century. It is based on a new dataset concerning the profiles of 386 entrepreneurs. The results are twofold: first, by proposing an empirically based taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs not exclusively founded on intuitions and qualitative judgements, the article provide valuable interpretative elements; second, the article puts forward some hypotheses about the relationship between entrepreneurship and Italian economic growth. In particular a cluster analysis singles out five different entrepreneurial typologies characterised by a widespread tendency to search for new markets, yet a scarce attitude towards innovation. Further it is suggested that the evolution of the institutional context slowed down the development of the entrepreneurial abilities and virtues necessary to grow.

Business strategies from Unification up to the 1970s

The previous Chaps. shed light on features of the market structure of Italian industry that serve in some way to describe mechanisms acting systematically throughout the industry, such as concentration, scale economies and business size distribution. Yet it is well known that, as well as being determining elements, such mechanisms are also the result of more or less rational strategies by firms (and other economic operators). The material forms taken by the mechanisms in different situations are thus heavily dependent on the influence exerted by the history of the firms themselves and on the context they find themselves working in. This Chap. therefore represents the other pole of the generalization-event pairing in modern industrial economics [Sutton 1998], where the focus is on historical exceptions rather than statistic regularities. The present contribution includes a series of case studies, re-read to find criteria useful for identifying the strategies. We thus attempted to supply answers to questions such as: did Italian firms aim at diversification or at concentrating around a core business? Did they adopt modern, Chandler style organizational models? Did they invest in R&D and human capital? Where did they sell their products? To what extent were they state-aided? How were they financed? In other words, on the basis of the answers to these and other questions, we aimed to supply a preliminary map of the micro-economic behavior of business concerns with regard to a ready-made set of variables. Such an experiment would have been almost impossible to carry out thirty years ago. At that time little was known about Italian business strategies and the little that was as recalled in a famous article by Giorgio Mori [1959, see also Mori 1959-60] came from jubilee publications by firms, a source by its very nature partial to say the least. Today the situation is greatly improved. Starting with the pioneering work of Franco Bonelli [1975] on Terni, business historians have published an impressive amount of studies1. It is difficult to use this literature,

Between Agnelli and Mussolini: Ford's Unsuccessful Attempt to Penetrate the Italian Automobile Market in the Interwar Period

This article discusses a chapter of the interwar history of the Ford Motor Company in Europe rather neglected by historians, namely its unsuccessful attempt to erect a solid base of operations in Italy. Expansion onto the Italian market had been part of the post-WWI Fords strategy of internationalization. It seemed to go well beyond the exploitation of an additional demand as its most interesting and promising aspect was the utilization of the Italian branch as a bridgehead into the Balkans, the East Mediterranean region, the Middle East, and North-East Africa. At the beginning this strategy turned out successful. But when in the late 1920s the Company tried to strenghten its position in the country—either setting up its own assembly plant or establishing a joint venture with an Italian firm—its attempt was blocked. To date scholars have focused exclusively on the political and economic barriers to entry erected by the fascist regime, urged by the powerful Fiat lobby. This was certainly the main cause. Yet, this study shows that on several occasions Ford hesitated and even hung back from acting. There for a few chances were missed: the most glamorous being an agreement with Fiat itself, so far ignored by historiography.

Explaining Entrepreneurial Success: Evidence from the Italian Case (Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries)

This chapter stems from a multiyear project on the history of Italian entrepreneurship based on a new data set of about 600 entrepreneurial bibliographies collected in the Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs1. The project has so far already produced two contributions, which were finalized to open the black box of Italian entrepreneurship and, more specifically, to work out an empirically supported taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs (Toninelli and Vasta, 2010, 2011). Such a taxonomy, grounded on the interaction between theory and history, was able to catch the basic characteristics of the phenomenon and go behind schemes and typologies so far produced by historiography. In the end, the statistical techniques there employed allowed us to identify five main typologies (clusters) of entrepreneurs2 which hopefully adds to the explanation of the dynamics of Italian capitalism. In a nutshell, the following are the main conclusions of that analysis. First, the component of entrepreneurship opened to foreign markets has been a distinguishing trait of the country’s economy: the search for new markets, therefore, was not an exclusive condition of the post-WWII period, but a consolidated feature of the entire history of modern Italy. Second, the level of formal education of many entrepreneurs is noteworthy, a result which contrasts with the well-known backward condition of the country.

Energy and the puzzle of Italy's economic growth

Abstract Even though energy has played a pivotal role in shaping the pattern of Italian economic development, it has long been neglected and has only recently begun to attract the attention of historians of the Italian economy. We still lack a global diachronic analysis linking energy, growth and environment endowments, and while the present contribution does not aspire to offer a complete treatment of such a complex question it does attempt to summarize the main outlines of Italys economic growth and to offer some preliminary answers to the question of in what ways have the scarcity of raw materials and particularly of primary energy sources, affected Italian economic growth. In answering that question, the article draws on series of quantitative data about the patterns of energy sources and consumption to show how these relate to the main phases of Italian economic growth since unification history.