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No. 12 - The entrepreneur State and the technological content of Italian economic development: The experience of IRI in the decades immediately following the Second World War

In the decades immediately following World War II, IRI – Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale – was the most evident manifestation of the State’s entrepreneurial action as to both the magnitude of its investments and the diversity of its spheres of operation. The presence of the group’s companies in strategic sectors of the national economy ensured that this leading public holding company played a crucial role in establishing the methods and limits of the modernisation of Italy’s productive system. Using unpublished documents and original statistical data, this essay traces the evolution of the model of technological expertise applied to the companies controlled by IRI, from the selective adoption of advanced production modules of foreign origin to the gradual formation of its own innovative capacity. It was soon evident that the policy of setting up internal nuclei of expertise, which was played out during the 1960s through the permanent inclusion of the R&D function in corporate planning procedures and increased investment in experimentation, was collapsing due to the specifically public nature of the group’s companies, as this obliged them to acknowledge political and social considerations that often disregarded the need for a technological reorganisation of production units.