Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial - Presidente da ...

adjust to higher risk levels. The challenge is then to appreciate howfar the US has gone ahead in terms of risk management at all levelsand to what extent they eventually might have gone too far in thatdirection, taking too many risks or too huge risks to be dealt with evenin a more sophisticated and more risk monitoring economy.In such international comparisons one has thus to take a «synchronic»perspective which sufficiently appreciates evolutions in relation withthe would-be characteristics of the new economic system. It is definitelyan intrinsic feature of the so-called new economy to be moreopen to risk taking, enlarging thus the spheres of productions and transactions.A real challenge is to assess the limits of this enlargementbeyond which the economy is becoming truly unsteady and open tomajor crises.From structural to organisational change:the growth of servicesStructural change is here thought of as the ground on which institutionalchanges are somehow rooted as well as constituting their soil.Structural change sets the scene of economic activities. This structuralcontext is marked by three interdependent changes. Two of these, i.e.internationalisation and the diffusion of the new technological systemcentred around ICTs were discussed above. The third dimension remains,at least in most economic analyses, often implicit, i.e. the current phaseof tertiarisation with a significant rise of new «business» service activitiesalongside the more long term, gradual trend of tertiarisation indeveloped economies associated with the growth of personal and socialservices.Central in the enlargement of the international reach of firms is thedevelopment of business and intermediary services with a global reach.This is linked to the phenomenon of the increasing tertiarisation ofeconomic activities, which has probably not been emphasised enoughas central element in the development of our economies. Tertiarisationin a broad sense is not a new phenomenon, and the growth of theDebates3 0 4Sociedade, Tecnologia e Inovação Empresarial