A dear old professor called me to congratulate the New Year and reminded me that this week marks the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of the book Clustering and Glokalising the Economy: The Magic of the Process, in whose presentation he was kind enough to accompany me. With a foreword by Michael E. Porter, the paper was intended to help understand how to successfully develop clustering and globalization processes to improve competitiveness by generating smart territories. The experience lived in and from the Basque Country in the intense, as well as attractive process of transformation of our economy and society, gave rise to conceiving a world different from the one that seemed to be offered. We thought we were picking up the signs that heralded new times.
Its content focused on five major elements that he then considered essential to move towards a welfare economy at the service of people, questioning some of the main ideas that dominated the economic environment in which we lived:
1) The radical transformation underway that gathered around what he considered the inevitable cooperative alliances for the new economy that we already appreciated.
2) The very concept of competitiveness whose linguistic association with exclusive competence and the benefit of the success of some and the failure of the rest distorted its true meaning, model of intervention and convergent economic and social objectives for the achievement of the well-being and prosperity of the communities in which applies.
3) The clustering of economic activity (as an economy-territory pairing), breaking down sectoral boundaries, uniting all the actors involved in the target economy and the advantages and strengths that its strategic development entails.
4) The essential importance of Factor Local, breaking the simple sale of an idyllic Globalization for all. A Glokalization beyond close or distant geographic spaces, far from the simplistic general contempt between “protectionist villagers” versus “universal, progressive and modern internationalism”, which until a few months ago has become a disqualifying mantra for those who did not embrace without criticism unlimited globalization by “pure market decisions”.
5) The importance of the “magic of the process” that explains why similar (or apparently identical) projects and goals worked in some places and not in others.
These key elements had a double axis as a guiding reference: the experiences lived throughout a professional career, project by project, and a certain academic theorization of what the application of the implicit models in the basic theories of what, Over time, it became Professor Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations and his MOC (Microeconomics of Competitiveness) network, which, from his Institute for Strategy at Harvard, generated adherents, researchers, practitioners and drivers of change throughout the world.
Renaissance of The Industry
Today, the world is witnessing a renaissance of the industry, a deep commitment to public-private cooperation as the inevitable engine of “a new economy” to be “reinvented”. A time in which globalization has shown its shortcomings and distance from the panacea that it claimed and claimed to be, in which different countries are committed to “alternative security models in manufacturing, supplies, supply chains and value”, and bets strategies that overcome “sectoral boundaries” in an unstoppable interconnected world full of new players, configuration of ecosystems (clusters?), combining converging economic, social and environmental policies. Reality repositions and relocates companies, turning their gaze to the importance of “making or manufacturing things at home”, and confers a high differential value on the local factor (its people, communities and institutions).
These days, he was reading an interesting article in Foreign Affairs magazine, “The New Industrial Age” calling for the return of the United States to become a manufacturing superpower. It is enough to collect its first paragraph here to understand the change that has been taking place throughout the world in search of a “new thought and inclusive economic model” and the consequent response by new key elements that would seem basic for the success pursued: “For many citizens, the American dream has disappeared. In recent decades, the USA has ceased to be “the world’s factory” and has become an importer of products. Since 1998, the trade deficit has cost more than five million industrial jobs and the closure of 70,000 factories. Small and medium cities have gone into decline and many communities destroyed. American society is increasingly unequal as “value and wealth” is concentrated in a few megacities and old industrial hubs are abandoned. It is becoming increasingly difficult for Americans without college degrees and degrees to reach the middle class, social mobility stagnates, and social anxiety and dissatisfaction increases. The loss of manufacturing has not only damaged their economy, but democracy itself.”
New Space For America
The article also points out those lines on which it intends to build this new space for America. Its author, Ro Khanna, representative of the United States for Silicon Valley, advances some practical lines that have been proposed to the Congress and the Presidency of the United States and that join all kinds of voices (Elizabeth Reynolds, member of the Advisory Council of President Biden and active in the redesign of an industrial policy for the United States), or Shannon O’Neill (The myth of globalization), president of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Homecoming (Back home), of Foroohar in his works around the decline and regional revitalization, etc. And so, throughout the world. Today, in Davos, world leaders are addressing deglobalization, reindustrialization, and the new observable paradigms in relation to regionalization, the strategic resilience that different countries have to shape, and new configurations of value chains.
Would it seem strange to us to hear that betting on a new world for the American economy would go through a strategy like the one you suggest? An integrated strategy that is shared within the framework of public-private partnerships, with a powerful Economic-Industrial Council, which reports directly to the President of the country, with direct access and control over all financed or supported public, business and academic programs and policies by governments, coordinating the program and actions of all departments (State, Defense, Industry, Commerce, Energy, Agriculture, Interior and “international economic diplomacy”), promoting a convergence between policies and economic and social benefits, with a policy to revitalize areas in decline, redefining a public procurement policy at the service of this “new industry”, with special financing for initiatives and business projects shared by different companies and government agencies, and an ad hoc fiscal policy to encourage the “return to manufacture at home”, providing itself with a new Technical Manufacturing and Techno Advisory Council public-private logic…
Undoubtedly, read in Euskadi it would not attract much attention. Today, in many parts of the world, fortunately, neither, while those who are concerned about the search for new solutions for the future growth and economic development and consequent prosperity of their societies, look at it eager to provide themselves with a prompt and effective opportunity and way to go.
Immersed as we are, in an interesting moment of inflection, with movements favoring a rearmament of socioeconomic thought with the mitigation of poverty and inequality as the guiding objective, and a real commitment to achieve truly inclusive, viable and sustainable development, supported by humanist, peaceful and democratic principles, with joint distribution of positions and results, it would seem reasonable to travel along these paths.
Let us hope that, indeed, we take advantage of the positive current in favor of a “new industrial, economic and social era”. It is a matter of learning from the experiences observed and “unlearning” from the mistakes made or from the negative and perverse effects of what, at a certain moment, was the saving and inalienable panacea. These are new and hopeful times in search of imagination, talent and knowledge, convertible into realities and manufacturable solutions, recomposing relationships and close, regionalized, understandable interconnection, based on shareable values.
Today, when the world aspires to equip itself with pro-industrial spaces as the motor for a path towards prosperity, it would seem reasonable to deepen our differential strengths, move rapidly towards new opportunities and redouble our confidence in the strategic journey undertaken. The collaborative wealth generated is a singular sap to achieve a new desirable future.
This article is originally published on noticiasdegipuzkoa.eus
