Innovation, State, Market

The rapid progress of digital technologies makes them an economic, political, and military powerful tool. The spread of new technologies will determine, relatively quickly, new geopolitical and economic relations, will push the rising of unexpected actors and countries, will modify traditional space-time dimensions, and will lead to a different balance between physical and immaterial aspects. A lot of challenges are associated with these scenarios, i.e., a new attitude of the European Union to digital competition, the role of the big ITC companies, the reduction (or the rise) of the gap, the intentional (or involuntary) improper use of technology. Digital technologies and their corollary, expression of the integration of main technoscientific trends, as big data, machine learning and high-performance cloud computing, aren’t a neutral instrument, but strongly conditioned by the imprinting of human beings. We can, therefore, refers to ITC as a collective stratification of diversified, geographically dispersed but interdependent knowledge, that lead to build a digital ecosystem. Since innovation is strongly related to growth and development, the role of innovation actors in shaping an efficient, fair, responsive and inclusive future will be discussed in this document. The paper, which focuses on the analysis of the Italian digital ecosystem, is divided into two sections. The first provides, through the analysis of statistical data and the main indicators, a summary picture of the diffusion of innovation in Italy and the second examines the role of innovation actors. From the analysis carried out, a digital culture emerges that still appears anchored to a traditional vision and where the strategies for innovation follow, not without a certain difficulty, processes rather than anticipating and orienting them. The Italian digital landscape is characterized, with exceptions of excellence situations, by a widespread unawareness of the revolutionary scope of innovation progress and to an uncertain state system between ancient models of participation in business risk and the inability to undertake with courage a new course that would see it actively engaged, together with the business system, in pursuing growth objectives with more inclusive and sustainable content.