White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 9The deep crisis in competitiveness andefficiency triggered off a process ofparticularly far-reaching, intensecreative reaction involving a largenumber of companies which explorednew technologies in particularlyflexible institutional contexts. Thanksto the effects of significanttechnological convergence andcomplementarity, this led to theintroduction of a cluster of radicaltechnological and organisationalinnovations based on the intrinsicfeatures of the system.The premises for the technologicalbreakthrough were the strongendowment of scientific andtechnological resources in the USpublic research system, combined witha tradition of considerable interactionbetween public and private research,and the systematic inclusion ofresearch activities in the organisationof large US companies. The fastgrowth in the supply of skilled labourwith a high content of universityeducatedhuman capital, whichpreviously had depressed white-collarsalaries, facilitating a reduction of thevariance in the distribution of income,became a crucial factor guiding thedirection of technological change. Thegradual slow introduction of a newtechnological system based on digitaltechnologies favoured a greater use ofa skilled labour force with a highcontent of academically-educatedhuman capital. The new digital-basedtechnological system, in turn, led toadvanced forms of remote controlover production processes and, mostimportantly, specialisation in theproduction of knowledge as goods(Antonelli et al., 2007).The great creative reaction of the USeconomy was rewarded withoverwhelming success. In the 1990s,the US economy experiencedunexpectedly high growth rates,previously inconceivable even for themost advanced economies, at leastaccording to the convergence model.But most importantly, the USeconomy developed a new benchmarkmodel based on the knowledgeeconomy. The economies of the UKand a number of Northern Europeancountries, especially Scandinavia,quickly followed suit by creating theconditions for the constituent factorsof the new model. Firstly, they rapidlyabandoned manufacturing, which wasgradually relocated to industrialisingcountries through the ableorchestration of multinationalcompanies already present in thesystem. Moreover, they achievedgreater levels of specialisation in theproduction of services with a highknowledge content which could beexported directly outside the domesticmarkets of the large globalisedcompanies.But the real driving force of the greatgrowth in output and overallproductivity in the US economy in1995-2005 may mostly, if notexclusively, be attributed to the veryfast pace at which the new informationand communication technologyspread, especially in the services sectorand, particularly, in commercialdistribution, logistics and finance.WHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 212