La genèse d’une culture locale d’entreprise au Nord-Est de l’Italie

Ever since the paradigm of “local development” has attained a central position within the regional sciences, the issue of suitable conditions for encouraging the endogenous formation of an entrepreneurial culture has become crucial. These conditions are believed to depend on the presence of a system of values, knowledge and conventions which is favourable to enhancement of an individual spirit of initiative, cooperation inside the local milieu and competition with the outside world: at the same time there must be an institutional system which is geared to encourage fitting individual customs and behaviours.
This book reconstructs the process by which an entrepreneurial culture has risen within a very confined countryside reality, the village of Bessica, in the heart of the Veneto (Italy). Although it remained at the margin of the regional industrialisation process of the 1960s, the village has been the protagonist of a quite original economic development. The marginal situation to which it was initially confined, along with the delay and the peculiarity of its developmental path, offer an exceptional opportunity to examine, in a quasi in vitro situation, the rise and development of a fiercely successful local entrepreneurial community.