If you talk about the problems and prospects of our economy with entrepreneurs and managers, they regularly bring up one distinctive characteristic of Italy’s successful companies, large and small alike: the ability to adapt their products to the diverse needs of customers, moving away from standard models. That is, Italian “flexibility” is often seen as the proper response to German “reliability”.
The bedrock of artisanal skills and professional competence upon which the fortune of a good part of Italian industry was built naturally favours a mind-set emphasizing competences over one tending to the mechanical application of preconceived ideas. Here Italy does not seem to suffer from any handicap.