Explaining Entrepreneurial Success: Evidence from the Italian Case (Nineteenth–Twentieth Centuries)

This chapter stems from a multiyear project on the history of Italian entrepreneurship based on a new data set of about 600 entrepreneurial bibliographies collected in the Biographical Dictionary of Italian Entrepreneurs1. The project has so far already produced two contributions, which were finalized to open the black box of Italian entrepreneurship and, more specifically, to work out an empirically supported taxonomy of Italian entrepreneurs (Toninelli and Vasta, 2010, 2011). Such a taxonomy, grounded on the interaction between theory and history, was able to catch the basic characteristics of the phenomenon and go behind schemes and typologies so far produced by historiography. In the end, the statistical techniques there employed allowed us to identify five main typologies (clusters) of entrepreneurs2 which hopefully adds to the explanation of the dynamics of Italian capitalism. In a nutshell, the following are the main conclusions of that analysis. First, the component of entrepreneurship opened to foreign markets has been a distinguishing trait of the country’s economy: the search for new markets, therefore, was not an exclusive condition of the post-WWII period, but a consolidated feature of the entire history of modern Italy. Second, the level of formal education of many entrepreneurs is noteworthy, a result which contrasts with the well-known backward condition of the country.