The Roots of Civil Society

This is supposed to be a joint blog shared by Karen Ford, Dragana Panic and me. But for some #$%@# technological reason I can’t see what they have written, so I shall keep this short and hope I`m not duplicating anything.

Our show got on the road today with a session this morning with Dr Vera Zimagni at the Industrial Heritage Museum of Bologna. It was very interesting – especially for geeks like me. Among the precious tidbits of info I have now locked away to drop on unsuspecting audiences – Venice is the home of our `double entry` accounting system. Also, the joint stock company and the insurance industry are Italian inventions (not just pizza and gelato - if you were here you would really know what I mean)

On a more relevant note an aspect of the industrial environment that caught my attention is that classified by number of employees, business that employ more than 50 people have dropped to 10% of all business in the region compared to 25% in 1951. At the same time the share of less than 29 employees has grown from 45% to 60%.

This caught my attention because the vast majority of our business members are small employers. In this region, Emilia-Romagna, businesses in the same industry cooperate while competing with each other – they share services, expertise, jointly bid for business and focus on quality instead of mass production. As a result they successfully participate in the export trade – something which our members find difficult to manage on their own.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how we can bring these ideas to our members? Please join this blog.