Formica - Entrepreneurial Renaissance Cities Striving Towards an Era of Rebirth and Revival

Innovation Value Institute, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Kildare, Ireland

Piero Formica

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..the human spirit since the Renaissancehas consisted and continues all the time to consist mainly, not in the discovery of positive truths, but substantially of negative ones. It consists, in other words, in knowing the falsity of what in the more or less distant past was thought to be certain

Giacomo Leopardi: Zibaldone ( The Notebooks ) (Leopardi )

Since the Renaissance, a concept called progress has been baked into our society. Progressfounded on an accumulation of knowledge through experience (and in the case of science, through experiment). To build on the past rather than endlessly relive it. Thats what separates us from the beasts.

Seth Shostak, US astronomer (Shostak )

Dream, explore, and discover: three distinctive features of a cultural movement referred to as Innovative Entrepreneurship. It is a movement brought about by virulent epidemics of innovation, which was as rife in the Renaissance as it was during the Song Dynasty (9601279) in China, the Dutch Golden Age (15681648), and in Britain in 16511851to name but three epochs which experienced magic moments of the accelerated tempo of innovation.

The Renaissance put knowledge at the heart of value creation, which occurred in the workshops of artisans and artists. Here, painters, sculptors and other artists met and worked together; as did architects, mathematicians, engineers, anatomists, other scientists and rich merchants acting as patrons. All of them gave form and life to Renaissance communities, generators of aesthetic and expressive as well as social and economic values. The result was entrepreneurship that conceived revolutionary ways of working, of designing and delivering products and services, and of seeing the world. In short, here was a spark of prosperity characterized by discontinuity.

Although inclined to absorb the innovative content of past ages, every rebirth shows signs of discontinuity with the past. Discontinuity reverses the sequence between what was and what will be. In the logic of continuity, there is no future without a past. The route to the future is outlined and conditioned by events that have already happened. In the sign of discontinuity, there is no past without a future. The future marks out and traces its own path independently, taking from past events what it deems appropriate for its construction. Renaissance, Reformation, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, Capitalism (in its various formscorporate, molecular, family, etc.): these are stages of transformative social and productive structures brought about by discontinuity.

Analysing the unfolding of social and economic conditions, researchers and scientists at the Santa Fe Institute ( ).

Countries and cities where policy makers are keen to usher in a renewed age of entrepreneurial renaissance are facing the maturity stage of the GDP life cyclethe yardstick of a countrys economic performance. Studies on human capital initiated in the 1960s by Gary Becker (19302014), Nobel Laureate in Economics, had already cast a shadow over this monetary measure of the value of a countrys overall output of goods and services. The entrepreneurial renaissance rewards specific qualitiesfor example, the contribution (the productivity) each employee brings to the team to which they belongrather than numerical quantities (e.g., number of staff and hours worked).

In the framework of the entrepreneurial renaissance, value creation occurs in the crucible of dialogue, and then through interactions between interdependent people. Here is the cause of the prominence of disciplines at the convergence of the sciencesfrom econo-physics, which studies the cognitive flows and collisions of ideas within and between renaissance communities toward which stakeholders from different disciplines converge and integrate, to neuro-economics, which examines the human mind in relation to decision-making processes for the implementation of new solutions with regard to specific tasks to be carried out.

In the games played on the innovation field, it may happen that the winner takes all. The market power of the new monopolist can cause severe disparities in the distribution of income and wealth. Growing inequalities occur not only between individuals; businesses are also affected. Those among them who raise high monopolistic barriers can enjoy returns on investment several times higher than the median values. As epicentres of value creation, cities are faced with a narrow path traced by innovation between progress and inequality, leading to the question: how to follow such a path? In the wake of Schumpeter, perhaps they should not worry about the new monopolies, whose strength might decline in the face of strong pressure from potential competitors determined to enter the most promising emerging markets. The best strategy might therefore be to let the market take its course. What, then, if the monopoly-derived profits of the incumbents withstand the attacks? In short, what if the markets are not as efficient and equitable as one might expect?

It is the different levels of government coming into the field, acting as referees, that we usually observe. On the front line in the battle against monopolistic powers, seeking to ensure economic democracy in the urban ecosystem of innovation, what motivations drive the behaviours of local administrators taking on the roles of referees? Does the answer lie in the simulation and the personal interest of the prince, or other, manifestly opposed, motivations? In the style of Niccol Machiavelli (14691527) and Francesco Guicciardini (14831540), the referee must strive to possess, together with firmness, the qualities of honesty, loyalty and a sense of fair play. This is not to say, however, that appearance necessarily matches reality. What is true for product and service markets is no less true in the political market where the prince, in the role of referee, can act for his own personal gain (what Guicciardini called particulare ) and so build a political monopoly, presaging disparities among people as well as among companies. Conversely, those referees who do not seek to achieve and maintain monopoly power, or the praise of the crowd through the mere appearance of their actions, seem determined to umpire properly in the field of innovation in order to pursue a shared prosperity and to provide opportunities that will not be stifled by entrenched monopoly power.