The Evolution of the Related Studies: From the Technological Gap to the Techno–Corporate Gap

Abstract

The studies on technological development, but above all on economic development linked to technological innovation, have shown over time that critical issues still need to be resolved. This section aims to highlight this aspect which, in many ways, is due to the vision with which the theme is generally approached. The analysis developed in this chapter is aimed at demonstrating how the barycenter of the critical factors has slowly shifted, involving specifically managerial aspects. The example of the gap between the USA and European countries in the last century is more than evident proof of how traditional macroeconomic indicators, although extremely important for defining evolutionary trends, are not the elements on which “levers” can be devised to reduce the extent of the technological gap. This is due to the fact that the search for innovation has followed a progressive internalization of innovative processes in companies; it depends and will increasingly depend on the strategies that the governance puts in place to achieve it as well as on managerial techniques for the exploitation of technological resources, and therefore on the concept of corporate development itself. A whole new perspective is then presented, aimed at demonstrating how important macroeconomic indicators can be considered as “symptoms” of a technological gap that has arisen as a result of important critical factors emanated from the purely corporate sphere (hence the need to investigate the techno-corporate gap).