LEARNING OUTCOMES

The focus is on the relationship between companies and technological and organizational change in order to show the different ways through which companies have achieved success and contributed to economic growth, either by multiplying the quantity and variety of goods by improving the quality of goods themselves.

TEACHING METHODS

Lectures will aim to an effective involvement of attending students who are expected to read the texts indicated in the syllabus distributed at the beginning of the course. The lecture will be both traditional as interactive, based on open discussion of the proposed texts.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

The course is organized in five distinct themes:

1. Entrepreneurship, technological change and economic development; we show how over the last decades has emerged ever more clearly the importance of technological change in explaining the performance of the developed economies and the importance of the role of the entrepreneur in this process;

2. The firm organization and technological change in the early stages of the industrialization process; we highlight the historical forms of company protagonists of the first western industrial transformation;

3. The birth of big business and the emergence of the ability to learn to invent; we focus on the genesis of big business and its close ties with the typical technological innovations of the "second industrial revolution";

4. Toward the plurality: big business in Europe and Japan; we illustrate the different business models, established in some countries (Great Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan);

5. Recent developments; we emphasize new issues related to the challenge of globalization of trade and the Information Technology revolution and their impact on business organization and technological change.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Obligatory texts

Amatori F. - Colli A., Storia d'impresa. Complessità e comparazioni, Milano, Bruno Mondadori, 201

Rosenberg N., Mowery, D., Il secolo dell’innovazione. Breve storia della tecnologia americana nel XX secolo, Milano, Egea, 2001

Other useful texts

• T. Ohno, Lo spirito Toyota, Torino, Einaudi, 2004
• Chandler, A.D., La rivoluzione elettronica, Milano, Egea, 2003 (parti che saranno indicate durante il corso)
• Scranton, Philip, Tecnologia, scienza e innovazione nella storia degli Stati Uniti, Annali di storia dell’impresa, 17, 2006, 299-326 (aulaweb)
• Langlois, R., The Vanishing hand: the changing dynamics of industrial capitalism liberamente disponibile all'indirizzo http://www.sp.uconn.edu/~langlois/Vanishing.doc