Thoughts on Competitiveness and Integrated Industrial Policy: A Field of Mutual Convergences

Competitiveness and industrial policy seem to play a critical role in the development and mutation of different spatialized socio-economic systems. This article aims to review the literature on these two concepts and suggest a novel theoretical framework. First, we identify that, in the relevant literature, industrial policy acquires progressively a repositioned content, described as a new, holistic, multidimensional, or integrated policy that can help create and sustain the competitiveness of the firms, industries, localities, nations, or other socio-economic agglomerations. In this context, we explore the form of an actual integrated industrial policy and propose the theoretical framework of the competitiveness web, in which the co-evolution of micro-meso-macro levels are explored, by placing the dynamics of business innovation at the dialectic center of the overall developmental process. This integrated industrial policy to strengthen competitiveness must also be able to promote innovation in the different local and regional ecosystems and, therefore, we conceive a policy mechanism in the form of the Institutes of Local Development and Innovation (ILDI). The primary purpose of these institutes is to diagnose and strengthen the Stra.Tech.Man physiology (strategy-technology-management synthesis) of the local socio-economic organizations. We believe that this new approach to the integrated industrial policy to strengthen the local competitiveness can contribute to facilitating the adaptation of the socio-economic systems, and especially the less dynamic and developed, to the new emerging challenges of the crisis and restructuring of globalization in the pandemic era.